


Of the Reddest Stolen Cherries

by eggblue



Series: Of The Reddest Stolen Cherries [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Death, Drug Use, Genderfuck, M/M, Parent/Child Incest, Prostitution, Rape/Non-con References, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-20
Updated: 2010-02-20
Packaged: 2017-11-03 00:35:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/375102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggblue/pseuds/eggblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I like true stories," Dean told him. "Where real things happen."</p><p>One story told in 30 parts, over 30 years for <span class="ljuser ljuser-name_spn_30snapshots"><a href="http://spn-30snapshots.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://spn-30snapshots.livejournal.com/"><b>spn_30snapshots</b></a></span>. Order goes from 01-30, not chronological. Title from W.B. Yeats.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Yosemite 1987 - Appalachia 1993

Yosemite 1987

The world stopped, as if frozen in the falling ice. "Shhhh," John whispered, and Dean's heart went blank, as it goes blank at every harsh sound his father makes, would ever make.

Brown forms stood as a blur, then started again, in the yellow headlights, so Dean had to open his eyes wide as could be to see what they were. "Elk," his father spoke, answering his question unasked. "A whole family," he said, hands still gripping the wheel, as if any sudden movement would scatter them. They didn't care either way, loping proudly across the highway up the mountain towards Yosemite. Dean counted one big one with antlers and a beard - kinda ugly and misshapen - and two younger ones - with fur, but skinny. He wanted to turn to the backseat and wake up Sammy, but then the extra blanket he had given him would be wasted, and his brother would have to shiver himself back to sleep again.

The largest elk just stood there with the lights reflecting in his eyes, black they were, like globes. So much of the world didn't care what you were thinking, Dean knew, and some people spent their whole lives imagining feelings where none had ever existed. Sometimes things were that empty and that cold, and it didn't matter what you did, it just was. Sam's imagination was different - his brother had an awareness that he had never seen before, and yet he could speak of the most fantastic things. Dean remembered holding him as a baby and looking to him for answers, though he could not speak in words. Sam was a soul and a comfort, and he wished for him even now, selfishly, though he was peacefully asleep.

Dean sat with his father and watched the frozen ice fall, waited for the world to let them be, and drove up the mountain into the dark of the forest, where the wild things were. It was safe there, quiet, and the monsters would not find them, as long as the headlights would stay on. Dean made a wish in his secret, darkest heart that they would.  
  
*  
  
Big Sur 1988

The fog hid the sun from the cold ground, the seabirds crying, the winding road their father drove them. They've been riding the 1 up the coast from Santa Monica, watching the water change from sun-flecked blue to white-capped gray. It was one of the roads John drove because he liked it, not for reasons of efficiency or reminiscing or work, whatever work was supposed to be this time. He looked over his outstretched arms on the steering wheel and thought of things he never talked about. Dean faced the passenger side window, thinking a clip of thoughts cut with his dreams, his fears, the rocky cliffs and roots poking through, gray slate and rust like blood.

Sam stared out the back, turned around away from his family, the road stretching out behind him shrinking and disappearing behind the rocks. They've been driving for days, stopping at rest stops and the outside of tourist attractions like the Hearst Mansion, high on a hill he would never climb, built with the kinds of plans he could almost understand. The need for a concrete life. He thought they would find no one on the mountain, maybe run out of gas, out of food, out of whatever it was they needed just when they lost it. He always thinks this, no matter how much Dean promises, no matter how much he tries. Dean tries; he always tries. The world is just different.

But there was a man at the one-shack Chevron station, a kind old man, around one more impossible bend through the fog. He shuffled over to the car, waved a hand and asked questions of warmth and no consequence.

"Need a fill-up?"

Sam heard John's muffled answer as he walked away from the car. "Yup. You're the only place we've seen for miles." Sam thought it was so quiet, he could hear everything. He heard the crunch under Dean's soles as he walked the gravel, the metal clang of the gas spout. If he closed he eyes, he thought he might still hear the ocean. Seagulls walked the tree-lined road without feeling out of place among the trees.

"Where you headed?" the old man asked. "It's gonna be dark soon."

"We're headed up to Monterey. Get a place there for the night." Dad always sounded so nice, so calm to strangers. Had to, he figured, otherwise -

Sam could no longer see the road through the insect-and-light-streaked windshield, and he knew Dad would tell Dean to clean it, standing on his toes to reach the middle, making faces at Sam through the glass on all sides. Sam will sink into the seat, poke his bangs and his eyes over the top of the cushion at wherever Dean is, share glances that say nothing more than "I know who you are" in brother code. I know you, even if no one else does. I know. Sam watched his brother walk away, seat of his jeans worn through white, mud caking his boots from the neighboring state, cheap sunglasses from a Florida convenience store. When he returns, he'll toss a bag of M&Ms into the back seat - "Dinner, Sammy" - open a frayed comic book and stare at the pages until he has to take his sunglasses off, has to squint in the half-light, has to dream on his own.

The car will purr through another tank of gas, another dark night in the mountains, another restless sleep on the black leather seat. Sam will awake through the night to see headlights on the ceiling, Dean's head turned towards him from the front seat, finally the fog and mosquitoes of the sunrise at the shore.  
  
*  
  
El Camino Real 1984

Dean didn't know any lullabies then, and so he never would. He'd learned to hold Sammy in his arms, rock him until he couldn't feel his weight anymore, until they were no longer separate. His hands learned that fine baby hair felt like silk, that Sammy's gaze was different for him, that he liked the sound of his voice even if he was just humming and there was no song at all. It was a panicked whine, a higher tone, a sound for a dog. As much for Sammy as for the air itself, for someone out there he just couldn't find, but had to exist somewhere, had to.

Dad was looking too, he thought. Drove the car down to Mexico, where they didn't even check who crossed over, just wanted them to come and try to find a place among the sun and the breeze and the missions of the baja. Dean watched the cacti, like people waving at him, or telling them to stop, stop, turn back, come no further, before it was too late. No going back, no going back. The friendly people of the sun, not the night people of the shadows, come to take them all away one by one, momma, baby, child. His thoughts raced like this, looping like the worn tires of the Impala, burning out on the road.

When Dad stopped, he didn't know why. Sometimes just to piss on the side of the road together, even urine shiny in the sun. Sometimes when Dean told him to stop, didn't know why, because Sammy wouldn't make a sound. He cried when the car stilled, and sometimes Dean needed to hear it. "For me," the baby seemed to cry. "Do this for me," again and again. Then they kept going.

Too often it was for the missions. Dean only saw one before he wanted to leave. The walls were white, like bone like wall like mother, the angels with glassy eyes like death looking down from the place where the corners met, the last place he saw his mother, suspended like them, and Dean waited for the fire.

John got on his knees only once, nails cutting into the waxy wood of the pews, weary bones falling on rock, and Dean railed with his fists at what looked too much like his own doubt and fear and "help me help me" - not like Sammy's demands, not demanding anything at all - just the surrender he couldn't bear to feel. The angels will never have him, Dean thought. The angels will never have any of them, not pushed up into the corners of the walls, not afire and gone to a better place, never giving into anything but each other - flesh to touch on the earth - no knees to the ground, no eyes raised skyward. Here. Here. Here.

John gave into him then, in that moment of grace in the church. Dean remembered how he looked at him and soundlessly got up, seemed to understand what Dean wanted and gave it to him, in the form of escape. Just that one time, got up off his knee and carried his son's violence against his chest - close, close - and felt it and knew it then, all the way back to the car. Dean sat in silence in the shade of the backseat, legs hanging out, and watched the young girl (she was round, like the sun, like the fire had touched her and she knew what it was) give them back the baby. Then held him, back to the border, where an old Marines story gave them passage, where he could tuck Sammy into the floor, feel his soft cotton-covered belly with one hand and sleep, without a lullaby.  
  
*  
  
Mojave Desert 1994

Beyond the suburban lights stretching out from the highway to the horizon, where the truly religious squat in abandoned trailers and harem tents painted with signs meant to be seen from the sky, the Impala stood covered in dust.

It'd been sitting there for months, driven only by John when he had to meet with men from the cities. "To make plans," he'd said. Sam had begun to hate John's plans, getting steadily worse - more decadent, more cruel. He didn't know where John picked up his ringmaster persona and ideas, perhaps a dream, a movie he'd seen, too much tequila the men made out in the Mojave. It smelled and tasted like gasoline to Sam, the way John had always begun to smell, just like the engine of the car he hated so much. He watched them make it when the flaps of the tents would fly open, the rotting acid smell of agave hitting him in a wave, and he'd have to spit into the sand, his dry mouth suddenly tasting of sweat.

John's voice for Sam was always harsh. "Someone gotta do something for this family, and your brother's the only one willing to do it. So you do what I tell you to do and think about being nicer to the both of us. We deserve it."

Sam scowled, threw around oiled rags and dragged his feet.

His father pointed a finger in his face. "It's about time. You just think about that, son."

All of Sam's imagination of eleven years had since dried up. He didn't care anymore. He did what he did so he could be there when the end came for Dean, whenever that would be. Dean barely knew he was there in the daytimes; he'd been too far gone too long. Every day John walked out of the tent, one bottle for Dean and one for himself. He got what else he could for Dean when someone would bring it through - the pharmaceutical train out of Cali, because they got whatever the suburbs didn't want, or had too much of.

He'd spent two weeks nursing Dean's bruises on the drive out here from the Badlands. They always seemed to be moving from one dusty stretch of nothing to another. All that changed was the colors on Dean's skin, the look in his eyes as he grew into something Sam knew not what. It scared him and turned him colder.

Every day Sam woke up with narrowed eyes and a curse on his lips. When he walked, leather-skinned and dry, to the edge of the shade, past John, where the tent flap whipped hard enough to cut, the curse would escape, hissing past his lips like a snake. Meant to hear it or made to hear it, John would deliver the same punishment. Sam would spend the day until noon shining the Impala with his spit, the sweat that appeared on his brow, under his arms, down the V-shaped bone on his chest - the only places sweat would appear, evaporating in the heat - the remains of a can of wax, the strength in the arms of his wiry frame. Over the buzz in his ears, the anger and the heat, he would hear them, getting ready for the heat to peak, the show to start.

"Come one, come all!" John would chant, his voice booming as a bear's. Everything about him was grizzled, Sam thought. Hairy, big he was, and flashed of all smiles and violence.

So the people loved him. So they did come, and some stayed for the late show, and some stayed into the night.

First, the drifters from the colonies, as they called it. The squatters in the desert who had come because they were looking to be saved. The ones who had given up liquor and sin in exchange for what God would bring them in the sand and the heat that never stopped. Where the nights were medieval and dark, starry and cold. Their fellow runaways in rectangles painted white, tents that billowed white, houses made of recycled plastic and white plaster. Then, the lost ones from the suburbs, broken down on the side of the highway, mistaken on the way to a tourist trap, saved by the drifters, or confused and choking by the smog and left to wander here. Even the regulars would come, escaping from their tract houses just for a day, lured by word of mouth and promises of something they'd never seen before. They were tourists, gratified by judging what they saw, calling it what they would.

Sam rubbed the wax deeper into the paint, pressing so hard he could barely move, and watched them come.

"Come one, come all!" John would chant in his carnal carny voice, a grin, a hum, on his lips. "Come see the Boy Wonder - the Fantastic Dean!"

Sam rubbed. T-shirt screeching on the paint. Dean's name; he had to use Dean's name. That name would never not be raw to him, would never hurt any less. Then it would be time for Dean to make his entrance, and if Sam didn't know better, he would think that it could never hurt more.

For what Dean was, was an exceptional beauty. Their father, lost in rage and poverty, had become entrepreneurial. Pictures of Dean would eventually make them all famous, in only the way that naked and pink and the Internet can do.

For now, Dean was a showy version of himself. The promise of cotton candy bliss. Painted-on freckles over powdery makeup, under darkened lashes, over stained lips. When all this would end, and the next phase begun, the makeup would be wiped away with heavy cream, when it was the close-up that mattered. Dressed only in black shorts, his skin still white under the desert sun, his legs bent just enough to make his ankles poke out if he stepped on the balls of his feet, his perky adolescent ass high and rounded enough to hold up his jockeys, Dean stepped up to the platform.

In his hands was a knife - its long blade tilted back and forth to glint in the sun, his chin tilted up in concentration when he threw it from one hand to the other, ready to take on all comers, if he himself weren't the bait. John reached into the pockets of his pin-striped pants, his ugly suits just this side of zoot, and took out a shiny new red apple. "Catch!" He would call, barking his words, and Dean would catch it with his free hand like a ball, bending only at the waist in a bow. As the audience clapped - they always did, Sam knew them too well - Dean placed the apple onto his head, balancing it there, stepping across the stage on the balls of his feet while John collected the money. "It's a show, folks, a real show. People come from miles around, across the great states of this land, across oceans of seawater and desert..." He went on and on. The sound Sam could never drown out. Even if he closed his eyes he could still see his lips move, watch the people slobber into their laps.

Hear Dean's footsteps across the stage - swear he could hear him place the apple on his head, place another between his hard smooth thighs, hold his arms out like a desert saint. Hear the slice of John's blade through the air, through the wooden planks behind his brother's head, through the crisp apples - the crisp, wet sound. Hear the drip of juices on Dean's tongue, down the skin of his legs, bowed together and holding the remains of apples in between. Hear the slurp as he took a bite, heard the buzz of the bees who dared not touch him.

Hear Dean's footsteps across the stage - swear he could hear John take his head in his hand, place another between his hard smooth thighs, hold his arms down like Magdalene. Hear the slide of John's cock through the air, through the parted flanks of his brother's body, through the tight cheeks and through - the crisp, wet sound. Hear the drip of juices on Dean's body, down the skin of his legs, bowed together and holding himself together around his father's belly. Hear the slurp as their thighs slipped together, heard the buzz of the men who would pay to touch him.

Dean was something amazing; he shouldn't have existed. It was clear to anyone who looked that Dean shouldn't have existed, and yet he did. He was some kind of a miracle, so ugly and beautiful, so there and not there; it gave them the out to stop caring, to stop thinking of him as something like them. There were things people could do to drag themselves down to the level where desire would eat itself; where engorged genitals could block out the sun, where bodies tasted of earth and death and cum all at once, where the profane was made holy again, and this was where Dean lived. Sam wished sometimes, far and above all his other deadened wishes, that he could think of Dean that way too - forget all he ever was and let the illusion drag him down. Dean, most of all, wouldn't let him.

At night, in the car where they hid sometimes with nothing but a blanket and Sam's formula bottle, Dean had put baby Sammy's fingers to his lips, kissed them until they tickled. When Sammy had cried, Dean had used his thumb as a pacifier. He still had the scars from Sammy teething in the night, when John couldn't, didn't want to hear.

Now, at night, in the car where they hid sometimes with nothing but a blanket and Dean's emptying bottle of tequila, Dean put Sam's fingers to his lips, his teeth, his tongue, took them inside and let him feel, silently, the way Sam knew him.

Sam wondered if John knew about them. He hoped so; he hoped it made his heart sour as an apple.  
  
*  
  
The Everglades 1991

They drove southeast along the highway 10, through Mobile and Tallahassee, deeper into the muck, until it formed on their skin, the sweat and the dirt and the no-see-ums growing thicker in the air. When Dean and Sam let their hair grow long, they got mistaken for girls and didn't correct anyone.

Sammy's hair grew out faster, curling down over his shoulders in shaggy feathering, like a misplaced Charlie's Angel. He wore plastic heart-shaped sunglasses, pink t-shirt his nipples shone through, jean skirt and alligator boots Dean found for him in Tamiami. He picked up a habit of lolling out his tongue at Dean, hanging out candy-stained red, obscene, like a dog's or a man's, when Sammy was still somewhere in between.

Dean wore a white undershirt, jeans just past his waist, mussed hair just past his chin and cherry lip gloss he carried in a stick in his pocket. His cheeks looked like they've been molded in plastic, not sharp like Sammy's elfin eight-year-old features, but no more real, freckled up high and unaccountable by strangers, allowing him to pass in the daylight, a shocking thing and unmemorable, like the sun.

"What're you?" They would hear drawled out long and slow at the store counters. "A boy? 'R a girl?"

When they walked along the side of the road, drunk teenagers would stretch their arms outside of car windows to burn them with cigarettes as they passed by speeding, laughing.

They were accountable and touchable only to each other, though Dean would know miles of skin, though Sam would travel the whole world, and they would never return here, to this place where Dean learned his shimmy from the snakes, where Sammy learned her high walk from the herons. Where John let them go to a place he almost couldn't get them back from, his jaws opening like a maw to snap the tendons between them. "Creeper John" they called him behind his back already.

At the beach, Sammy wore the suit Dean bought him - little red shorts to match his sunglasses. He body stretched out skinny on all sides of it, dark and lean. The dark round pointed discs of his nipples, the jut of his chin and nose, the barely-there fullness in his shorts, were all things Dean loved to stare at and pinch; tease him just to make him blush.

Sammy made up lyrics to the tunes of songs he knew and hissed them in Dean's ears at the candy counters to make him giggle. He took the monsters from Dean's comic books and painted the faces of John onto their reptilian bodies and monstrous apes with his stories. Dean laughed and laughed with him, but Sammy waited for his brother's stories to come, to do more than just laugh.

Later, Sam would understand how Dean couldn't make fun of the faces that floated above him every night, couldn't pull a story from his breath and beat it out of himself, out of his gut like a drum. He would have heard the sound himself at night by then, known it was there, waiting for him in the future. How the men would be coming from thousands of miles away to hear it, beating with that pulse in their blood. When Dean would let them in, that beat would thrum in him, and Sam would hear it - a deep and constant thrumming like no regular beat, no regular sound he'd ever heard - how it would shake away even the screaming inside of him and even the thoughts that Dean would have in their absence and even the thoughts Dean may have had when they came but no amount of them coming could silence it, no coming they've heard yet. Only the breath of Dean's lungs, in and out, sweat-covered cage expanding each time. Only the breath of Sam, the quiet whisper he heard like a howl. But it was the breeze at night, and all that could comfort his voice and his sweat was that howl.  
  
*  
  
Big Bend 1995

Sam knew these places of absolute darkness existed, the kind where the only thing leading to his next breath was a single electric light, or the short life of a match. The dust-colored plateaus of Texas led to the dust-colored hills of Texas led to the dust-colored valleys, but here in the nighttime, next to their campsite, it was all shades of black. He preferred the stars spotting around up there, above the matte line where the treetops began, far higher than he had ever been. But Dean lived down here where his face floated for three seconds in the darkness, lit by fire and then gone again. He existed for as long as a cigarette.

Sometimes he thought these places of darkness were everywhere they went, a part of himself or John or Dean or all three of them, like his own dark little heart. Sammy's dark little heart - coal covered in soot covered in tar, pumping with oil - pumping for Dean all he did and did not want. He went towards where the light had flashed and knew Dean would still be waiting there, would give him the six minutes it took to bring the cigarette down to the filter, then no more.

"Hey, Sammy," Dean spoke over his shoulder. His voice was thin and cut down by moans when Sam heard him at night. All Sam could see was his moonlit face, mostly in shadow. He always got what was left.

"Dean? When are we getting out of here?" He barely heard his own voice. All it was unsure and halfway to pleading. "You said soon, right? Last time I asked."

Dean huffed out smoke and breath, mingling together. "I know but you just asked me, what was it, a week ago?"

It had been two months. "Yeah. But..." He shuffled dust at his feet. All the land here was dust, surrounded by rocks, covered in rocks, dappled with spines and fangs. "I just wanna know. You always say the same thing, but... I wanna know."

"Soon, Sammy."

"Tell me, Dean. I wanna know."

"Sammy..." Dean huffed.

"I wanna know! And you never say. You just say 'soon' and then forget. Then you say 'soon' again and I never know. I just need to hear something else. Tell me something else." He heard himself beg, but it wasn't, it wasn't, it was just desperation.

Dean sucked smoke in harder, wanting this to be over, but turned to face him anyway. "I'm doing this the best way I know how."

"We need a plan. Just - tell me, do you have a plan? 'Cause I could do something. I'm younger than you, but I could help. He lets me leave. He lets me do stuff."

Dean whipped his head around like a horse, all those horses out here, shaking their manes and flicking their ears like that. They were wild, like them. They had no masters.

Sam never, ever wanted to ask. "Don't you wanna go?"

Dean turned back to walk away, flicked the last bit of tobacco and burned his fingers - "Fuck!" - stumbled over brush, but never stopped.

"Dean! _Dean!_ " Sam would never know what he was swearing at. He always figured it was him. But he was the last one Dean should be angry at, the one who never used him, and the only one he loved. He guessed sometimes that Dean had the choice to love everything there was to hate around him, or to love Sam back. It would have been an easy choice to make; Dean's whole life had given him that one simple choice. Yet he never made it. He took what else was offered, took John's constant presence, took the men on the flat roll-out beds - took their sweat and mouths and seed, took their hands to mark his skin, took their insults just as well - and their alcohol and promises, took his possessions from gas stations, all that was cheap and free.

Taking Sam meant being something else entirely. He didn't know what Dean would be when it was just Dean. Would the panic set in after a matter of days? Would the whole world scare him and make him alone in it, some place Sam could never reach? Would things get all turned around, Sam's fault for leading him away, and the heart that Dean could have had come crashing down on them in a fury, some time bomb in his chest, breaking for all it could not hold? Dean was a mystery. But then Sam knew he was too. They were hollow things made of oil and skin and smoke, not real yet, not fully made. All the parts they were missing we scattered in the deserts and the night sky, tattered things for coyotes and wolves to find. If they took all of Dean away, would Sam even find him again? Would he see it and notice, Dean breathing smoke in and out, eyes dry and dull?

Dean might be grateful for Sam being gone. He could smoke in peace, have nothing more to think about, let them take the rest of himself away. Dean lived for Sammy, making it so much harder. Because Dean's life was a hole he was digging in the desert that something had to end up inside. Every breath he took, _at least it's me_ , and every choice he did not make, _me, not Sammy_. If Sam had given him any choices, he had only give him two - Dean or Sammy. Everything else there never was, never would be - just a binary life, alively robotic. Dean Sammy. Sammy Dean.

He wanted a tunnel out of the absolute darkness. Sam needed a way up. The way back was slowly through the brush, cracking branches following his footsteps home. He would break them all and keep on going, finding himself in the morning at Dean's, asleep.  
  
*  
  
Niagara Falls, late 1980s

The first time he gave him a ring, Sammy was just a baby.

"You want it?" Dean held it out in front of him between his thumb and fingers, sugar-candy pink shining in the sun.

Sammy took the ring between his lips and tried to bite.

"Ew, you slobber!" Dean wiped his hand on his jeans and then pushed the ring at Sammy's chest. "It's plastic - you can't eat it. Here, put it on your finger," but there was space showing on all sides. "Never mind - use your thumb." He placed it there himself, used to doing everything for his baby brother. The yellow plastic just fit, but the pink plastic heart with "Niagara Falls" written on it jutted off the side of his hand. He wore it until the words disappeared, worn down by chlorine of hotel pools that summer.

The second time, Sammy was older, so Dean tried again.

He had irony on his side. "Sammy, will you marry me?" He even got down on one knee, held those awkwardly long teenage hands in his own and put the ring on himself. This time, the shiny pink plastic clashed with Sammy's painted fingernails, but it fit. Sammy's skin was tanned and beautiful, more olive than it had ever been, even though they were in New York and it was cold, even though the hair at Sam's brow and his green-flecked eyes seemed to burn with a kind of heat Dean never remembered having when he was his age. But he remembered very little of how time passed, their years together one clump of shared memory where nothing ever seemed separate and alone.

"Yes, Dean," Sammy put his hands on his shoulders and leaned down, nose to nose. "I will."

Dean felt his own eyes cross, watched his brother's, felt his long brown hair fall against his chest, and didn't quite know what was going on, but knew something about it was trouble.

Then Sam had the ring and was running through the tourists again, waiting for Dean to catch up.

They had nothing else to do after seeing the falls, except to see them again.

"Who cares about some falling water? We've all seen rain, right?" Dean would joke. Then they spent the rest of that week inside watching TV while John wandered the streets looking for something neither of them knew what. TV was full of normal people doing normal things, not fathers and their sons lost on the road.  
  
*  
  
Bible Belt 1993

By the time they got to Nashville, John had been saved.

It started long before, in between the Pledge of Allegiance before the blackboard and the heft of his rifle in Echo company, in the red flare glow over the canopy, the bullets over his head and the promises he made to Mary to return home. It called to him across the world and back again, said there would always be something more waiting for him. He never believed in God until he learned of the demons; he never saw the demons until his sons were born; then, he saw them all around, creeping in the shadows and the faces of the ordinary people who called themselves his neighbors; saw them even in Mary, pulling them behind her like a ghost rattling the chains of their precious, precarious fortune. She promised him, she promised.

The farms stood still by the roadside near Waco. As he drove, he listened to country stations and Christian radio; sometimes both, it was hard to tell the difference anymore. He expected things to sound different than they did. This was close to Kansas, close to home. The farms spoke of nothing, but the landowners shared their philosophies in makeshift billboards, paint fading but not cheap:

_"Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell." (Proverbs 23:13-14)_

John stopped the car after midnight near Refinery Road, just off the Interstate. All day they'd been in Texas, and they weren't going to get out tomorrow, driving east. The street looked gray in the headlights; orange lights dotted the night from far away; the rest was black. Spotlights meant refineries, bright enough lights to catch the fan of smog in the air and show the silvery metal almost white. Sam would think they looked like sentient robots, planning in the night to take over in our sleep. John would have to laugh at such paranoia; monsters never revealed themselves so clearly, not even in Texas. Even at night the sky looked blue against the silver. There had to be at least five stations, modern tan rectangle buildings, water from the dam, wide flat silos, tall thin stacks, metal infrastructure supporting hovering white lights.

This was not monstrous - instead, progress. This is what it came to. He knew the meaning; he worked his life for it; he was just never meant to find a way in. He knew that now; the culmination of Mary's death, no work, no lies, no way in. It reminded him of when he heard about the moon landing; he had been knee-deep in paddies that felt like mud puddles in Kansas, only on some alien world, so far away he could never explain, barely on the edge of 19, and some other guy was in a space suit on the bone-dry lunar plains; he thought of the conversation they could try to have, to try to suck meaning out of their shoes like so much mud and dust. He started to laugh, the kind of belly laugh he would be known for later, born that day, and it wouldn't let go of him for long stretches of time, until his buddies would threaten to pull out their guns, long-since driven mad by the inexplicable sound of it, by the juxtaposition.

Juxtaposition, John thought. That's it - juxtaposition. The meaning of things lay in between them. He'd have to dig.

Dallas looked no different. It was an orange-green dome on the horizon, criss-crossed by overpasses like dead tentacles; it was as if the refineries had grown and supported whole suburban blocks, then spread out some more, dotted with shacks and taco huts and electric wires. There were no people out for scale, no sense of size of things; wood looked like metal looked like rust looked like light; a telephone pole was a dead tree, smog was a fire; yes, that's it.

Past the city, he saw devils in the orange glow of the tumbleweeds. "Come stand with me boys. Look at it - all of it. D'you see?" It was all fire, so many shades of fire. The tops of the thin gap pipes flared like torches, the refinery spotlights shone, the streetlamps buzzed, and the whole of the city was covered in a halo of smog, beige-blue and green like dirty cotton.

Dean rubbed his eyes and squinted, hugged his arms and tried not to shake. "Yeah, Dad. I see it. 's Dallas, right? Said on the map. What're we doin' up? We gonna stop for awhile?" His speech was slurred, eyes tired, jaw sore from sleep and yawning.

"We're just stopping for a minute," John touched Dean's shoulder and looked behind him. "Just wanted you to see it."

Sam stood there half-awake in the street lights, undershirt flimsy, frayed, and filled with holes. His hair hung to his shoulders and his nose stuck out sharply from the black shadows of his face. He didn't look or dress like a girl anymore; not since he was nine. John felt his eyes, felt the deliberate sag of his arms and the sure square of his shoulders, all blank with anger, directed towards him like patience's gun. Sam was ten; Dean was fourteen. It was all gonna happen so fast now.

Their money went missing outside of Texarkana.

They'd been sleeping in the car, John in front, his boys in the back, belongings stuffed between the seats and blankets covering all. He woke up from dreams he couldn't remember and checked his pockets. He'd had a thick wad of twenties in his pocket, another in his boot. Twenty-four twenties from hustling pool. Twelve in each. What he'd left in his pocket, what he swore he'd left, wasn't there. He opened all the car doors so Sam and Dean fell out with aluminum cans and candy bar wrappers, strung all the clothes out in the dirt, shook the blankets out, the one remaining floor mat, the tools and the bottles clanging against each other as they flew out of the trunk.

The dirt from under the scrub was blown all over the road they parked beside. It was quiet enough to hear the water from the brook, just beyond the trees. It was calming and constant, like Sam's blood was straining to be, as he listened to his father's breathing, like he could feel it hot on his face already. "Look! Look, dammit!" John's voice was loud and shaky, the worse after a night of drinking. Sam recognized it, but he didn't think about what it could mean. It just was, to him.

When John grabbed his arm, he wasn't even paying attention, just staring at the mess on the ground, at what was and wasn't his - an old pair of Converse sneakers that used to belong to Dean and that he'd grown out of two months ago, refilled plastic bottles now empty, torn bags of Doritos, guns'n'ammo magazines, dirty tube socks - the stuff of his life, and he didn't even understand half of it. John grabbed his arm and pulled. "Tell me what happened!"

Tell him what? What happened to the money? What happened last night? What was happening now? Sam didn't have an answer for any of it. "Dean," he called. "Dean..."

Dean got up off his knees, came running, and moved his fists to John's chest, not pressing or beating, just holding there with his will, "Not Sam." He said, "Not Sam," and looked at John until John heard him. "Not Sam, not Sam, not Sam."

Why, not Sam? Sam thought, his arm still in John's fist, fingers wrapped all around and then some. Not Sam, what? John let go of his arm, pushed past Dean, pushed down in the dirt, and walked out to the edge of the water. Fists at his sides, he just stared out as they silently counted the rise and fall of his chest, his breaths slowing down.

Afterwards, they piled what they wanted to keep back in the car and John just started driving. Dean stayed in the back and kept Sam's head in his lap and covered the whole back seat in a blanket, letting his brother sleep past the dawn. Silence had a way of multiplying his fears into possibilities that felt as if they were happening even if they weren't. This one, John wouldn't stop until they were out of gas, ditch the car and keep on walking. This one, John would accuse them of stealing and raise his hand against the truth. This one, he would steal a bottle and draw this out until the next day. This one, Dean would have to steal candy bars instead. This one, John would smile out of the corner of his mouth and forget.

Finally, it was a shared hot dog with every free topping bought with change and split into threes. "I'm doing the best I can. It's the best I know how. So you take it, and eat it."

Dean gave his to Sammy, who was too sleepy to notice.  
  
*  
  
Graceland 1993

Across the border of Tennessee, at the edge of Memphis, the bridge was a half-moon on the water. This bridge was spokes of steel over their first glimpse of the Mississippi in two pairs of sneakers ago, twelve states.

"Don't you want something, Dean? What do you wanna be, when we're all grown up?"

Dean shrugged. "I'm gonna be just like Dad. I mean, I already am, right?"

Sam didn't say anything.

Dean punched his shoulder. "Hey, what do you want to be then? What's wrong with what you've got? You've got us, right?"

"Yeah. I guess I do. It's just... Don't you ever want to choose something? Do decide, instead of just what you've got?"

"I dunno. You've only got what you got, right? Can't make it any different. So? Sometimes I want to eat until I get full and sometimes I want to sleep without you pokin' into me all the time and sometimes I want to know what everyone else is thinking of, but I'm not gonna know it. So."

"What's wrong with wanting stuff?"

"Makes you unhappy, that's what. You're a sourpuss, Sam. Always have been. Suck it up sometimes. You wanna be a man, right? Like Dad?"

"Not really."

"Yeah. Well. Wait until you're older." Dean lived for the promise of older.

Instead, John took them to Graceland later, or let them wander around the front gates while he sneaked on the tour, flirted with a tour guide who looked like a stewardess in a polyester pink uniform. Dean hoped he'd stay away for a few hours. Long enough to charm an old couple into buying them ice cream cones, to charm a guy in front of the hotel to bum him a cigarette. He didn't care about some stupid house, another one he couldn't live in. Like a tourist trap was any good use for a house that people could actually be living in.

He waited with Sam at the front gates, curved and painted with musical notes like a song he couldn't read. "What's 'Graceland'?" Sam asked, his chin still sticky. Dean wiped it with the edge of his shirt. "Beats me," he said. "Grace is a girl's name."

Their gas ran out in Nashville, but John knew strangers in Nashville, and Tennessee was just that way about wild-eyed strangers and their bleary-eyed sons in the middle of the afternoon. He found a girl named Angela at a bar stool one night and didn't come back to the hotel for days. Dean kept the TV on loud all the time and played blackjack with Sam for M&Ms on the pink and orange paisley bedspread. They watched Danny Devito movies and fell asleep to laugh tracks. Dean told Sam to take baths, brush his teeth, and take naps just to pass the time better.

"If Dad's gone, what's gonna happen to us?" Sam would ask in the darkness at bedtime, the TV flashing on his face.

"Dad's not gone, Sammy. We're long gone now, and no one's gonna come to find him."

Sam sighed. "Yeah, I guess so. It's just that - if Dad never came back, would we still get to stay together?"

"I'm never leaving you. Never."

"I know. But, what if?"

"I don't know. I just know they're not going to take you, so you don't have to worry about it. Get some sleep."

"I'm not tired. What're you gonna do, Dean? You can barely drive."

"I'll drive if I have to. I'll get food, I'll steal, I'll kill someone if I gotta. I can be meaner than Dad if I wanna be. Just let them try to take you away. Let them try it."

Sam never found Dean's bravado comforting, but he thought maybe Dean was comforted by it, and believed it, though he knew better.  
  
*  
  
Appalachia 1993

John liked that Angela was a dye-job redhead who still wore cut-off shirts even though the trend was passing. She was up for anything after enough alcohol, and alcohol was easy to come by as long as the bars were open. On a Saturday night, he got drunk enough to be caught up in a heist at a liquor store out in the sticks when the neighboring county had gone dry. They never found any guns, but the manager'd said there were, so he'd had to run for it.

Angela gathered the boys while John waited in the car, and they headed out to her brother's place in West Virginia. "Cyril's real nice," she said in the darkness. "You boys'll like it there. But we gotta go."

"Yeah, real nice," Dean mumbled, but he shook Sam awake, grabbed his comic books and both their shoes, the rest of the M&Ms, and ran in behind her and out the open door.

The mountains were different here, Dean thought. There weren't even convenience stores, and the stores didn't have signs, or even paint. They were just people's houses where they traded any old stuff for more stuff - cans of gas for cans of beans, old shoes for wood planks, mason jars of clear liquid for just about anything. Junk was roosting in the grass like rocks. It made him want to keep Sam close, hold onto him at night and listen for sounds. The next time someone came and got him in the middle of the night he wasn't gonna go. He was sure of it. Sam had asked him to. Sam tried to convince him of these things when they walked alone through the woods, hoping not to see a single soul. "I know you could take care of me if you had to. We could do it, Dean."

"Yeah. Sure we could." Dean was always scraping the earth with a stick, stabbing at it like it was his own itch.

"So why don't we?" Sam had wanted to ask for days. For maybe longer than that. He knew what Dean would say, but he wanted to be the one to ask.

Dean huffed out a laugh. "What? Just us? On our own?"

"We could do it if we wanted. You take better care of me than Dad, anyway. He wouldn't care if I was gone."

"Shh, don't say that. It's not true. He would care a lot if we were gone. All he does, he does for us."

"You think so?"

"I know so. He tells me all the time."

"I've never heard him say that, not to me."

"Yeah, well, he says it to me." Dean held his favored status up as a way to end all arguments.

Sam always took it, though he never saw it the same way. "When? When does he say it, Dean?" Sam wanted him to say it then, wanted Dean to admit the things John does in the dark that he doesn't see. Because Sam doesn't know, he really doesn't, but he knows whatever it is, Dean won't say, though it is the only thing keeping him close by, when he would swear all Dean needed was Sam. "Dean? When does Dad say why he does any of the stuff he does?"

Dean shrugged. He had to know it too. John had been different lately. He talked of monsters chasing them up into the mountains. It wasn't just cops. It was creatures from ghost stories he'd heard as a child come alive, tall things with glowing eyes and claws that only came out in the dark. He began reading the Bible, listening to the old men drinking moonshine and preaching from rocking chairs, speaking Gospel about the days to come. Dark days, they said, and certain to be. "These things came after Mary," he'd say to them. "You don't remember, but I was there. I saw them, felt their breath on my neck. Black, evil things." Their dad stared with wide eyes and believed.

"Do you believe in monsters?" Sam asked, like he'd been asking every day since it began, relying on Dean's answer.

"I don't know. Maybe," he said. "Monsters might exist, but they're not going to come after you, Sammy. I promise."

Sam wondered how he knew, but he wanted to believe him, more than anything.

Later, when he is alone, Sam can only hear muffled sounds from the next room, like old mattress and mouths breathing, over the drip of the faucet. He sits in the cold porcelain tub of the bath until it gets cold and he starts to shiver. He wants to stay in there until he's asleep, until he knows John is passed out under the blankets with his shirt off, hairy chest rising and falling, his snore so loud he can hear it through the closed door, and Dean would almost let him stay. He can see it like it's happening, any time he wants to, like clues in a dream.

Then Dean really is there, looking as alien to Sam as he'd ever seen him, freckled skin all mottled with red, his hair already wet and matted down, naked and pale in every place that mattered. He'd been waiting for Dean to do just that, to open the door and climb in after, tip toe across the floor naked and climb in behind him, turn the water on and make it warm again, wash his hair for him and scrub himself all over until they're both pruned and tired. Until the water is colored and filled with fallen pieces of them, dirtier than he thought it could be, until Dean's nakedness is less startling and strange, and he feels like his brother again.

"Have you thought about it any more, Sam?" Dean asked to his back, squeezing out the washcloth and letting the water run down. "About running away?"

Sam was so tired, suddenly. Tired beyond belief. His answer was important to Dean, he could hear it in his voice, but his head was so full of stuff he couldn't figure. Sam nodded. "Yes. I think about it."

"I think." Dean made a decision. Sam could feel it, but he couldn't really know. "I think about it sometimes too. But then, I think I would want to come back, too. You know? We could get away, but then we'd end up back here. We'd try to change it, but nothing could ever be any different."

"Yeah," Sam said, his mouth going dry. "So what, then?"

"I don't think I could take that, you know? Running away is one thing. But it would have to be forever. And I don't think I could do that, no matter how much I wanted to. Forever's a long time. When it's family. And what if..."

"Yeah?" Sam closed his eyes, his brain making his tired with dreams and clues and promises.

"Well, I figure I can't promise you that. I don't wanna break a promise like that to you, Sammy. Not that one. If I'm gonna find a way out for you, it's gonna be for good. You understand?"

Sam nodded. It'd been going on for a while, he figured. A whole new world opened up with what he figured. It was a bad one. One where his heroes had lost all hope and monsters were waking up behind their eyes.  
  



	2. Great Lakes 1993 - Route 66 1994-1996

Great Lakes 1993

Sam thought he understood insatiable hunger sometimes. The hunger for things to be different, but not knowing how to change without losing it all.

He lost his father first. John's eyes were filling with madness. He decided to run north to the Great Lakes in the hopes of ridding themselves of their troubles for good. They could make it to Detroit, and from there, the border.

But monsters lived there, great things with glowing eyes, yellow fangs that smelled of death, long pointed tongues of a serpent that hissed in the night. They called to John, spoke his name on the wind and traveled faster than the shadows.

Dean thought his father was going crazy too, until he heard the locals speak of the Wendigo - the cannibal monster, the hunger. It was a legend of a sane, Christian man turning into something wild and helpless in his need, calling for others to join him in the night. Turn into what you are, it said, and called you by name.

They heard it calling - Wiiiiinchessssster, Wiiiiinchessssster - in the cold whip of the wind off the lakes. Sam would never have believed it, but he heard it. Dean seemed to hear it even louder. He had a shifty-eyed look lately that scared Sam to death - he could lose his father, he could lose even himself, but he couldn't deal with losing Dean, and he didn't have the means to care for him, when Dean needed him to, so badly these days. He wanted to tell him, so much, but he was afraid his questions would break Dean open more, his fears too raw to handle. Sam should have seen it before, he should have, but he didn't. Dean looked as if he was going to take off in a run every time they stopped the car. He was jackrabbit scared, Sam could tell. He hoped when Dean did, that he would have the guts to run after, say: let's run the bottom of our feet raw, lose the skin, bleed out and run on sticks and bone, float over the earth like ghosts and never touch, feed only on each other, forget who we are but still wander and call, howl like monsters in the darkness, die and be born again on the wind.

*

Black Hills 1993

This growing thing between John and Sam was like a living monster, a hated pet.

Sam woke up alone in his bed in a yellow hotel room, with yellow curtains, yellow light, and saw them - his brother, and his father working out his demons without shame, drunk and grunting, over his brother. Sam couldn't move, wished he was sleeping, but he wasn't. He was complicit and alone and there, feeling Dean's shame and fear covering his own anger like a blanket.

That was the first time he saw John break him in in the mornings, breaking him with dilemma and fear. Sam imagined all the things he could do to John to make him stop, but they all seemed like imaginings of a 10 year old, and not the actions of a man. He thought of poison and guns, knives and police sirens, homemade bombs and mail-order machetes. All he knew about the world he learned at the free library and on the TV, and in the faces of tourists, and none of that made any sense at all when it came to this. His brother and his father, and what he should be able to realize, but can't.

"You have to realize something about your brother," John told him on the porch, on a grateful night when Dean was sleeping, and the sound from the bug light snapped like his father's voice, clean and cold. "When you boys were born, I began to see something growing in you. Your mother could see it too, while she was alive. It was the thing that burned our house down, the reason we're running." Sam went cold. "It was monsters, son. Monsters exist, but not like you think with your fairy tales and fantasies. They're right here," John tapped Sam on his cold, cold chest. "They grow and they grow, and soon you can't touch them. But Dean has a special gift - call it a kind of faith." Faith in what, Sam didn't know. "He's a healer. He quiets the monsters. Now, don't you look at me like that - I've seen it. One day you'll see it too, and you'll come to see things the way I do. You'll join with your brother and me in ridding the world of those horrible, monstrous things. You may not be gifted like he is, but the best I can do - and I'm trying, son, I'm really trying with you - is to not let it get any worse." Sam wanted to stop breathing, just to stop. "You think I can't see it but I can - that thing coiling in you like a snake, wanting to strike out at me, wanting to strike out at everything. I used to see it in the way you dressed, all whorish, trying to tempt Dean away from his gifts. Now it just sits in you, growing, waiting 'til the time is right. But I won't let it get its claws in you." John almost sobbed, so Sam flinched at his tears. "God has shown me the way, and I won't let it happen. But I won't destroy you either, not like God wants. I want to give you the chance to change. Everyone deserves that chance. I can be more merciful than God. You hear me? But I won't be easy. I'll make it real hard on you, Sam. Do everything I can to show you the path to salvation. All you have to do is take it, do as I ask, and listen to the voice of God. Can you do that? Can you do that for me, son?"

God? Sam thought. God? He narrowed his eyes and tried to wrap his head around his father's words as his whole world went cold.

*

Crater Lake 1994

Dean ran away at the deepest, bluest lake in all the land.

Sam always thought if Dean disappeared, he would find him, no matter how dark how cold. He didn't think it would happen that morning in January, the day after Dean's fifteenth birthday, when all Sam could remember was the crazy look in his eyes, like a lost man in the woods, knowing a blizzard was coming as his last fire was dying out. Sam knew it Dean could find the bottom of the lake he would stay there, take others into his grip and pull them down with him if he had to, even Sam. Sam knew that feeling - every time he looked at the world without Dean in it.

And the lake was so clear and so blue, Dean said, like his mama's eyes. He'd just wanted to touch it. The lake was a crater in the mountain, a perfect circle. Sam read the brochure to Dean out loud, how it was made by a meteor, and how water had gathered in the crater as a blue pool surrounded by pine trees and creatures drawn to the miraculous. "That's something," Dean had said. Sam nodded too, fascinated as he was by all things outer space and far away from where he was.

Sam's love for his brother burst out of him when Dean was closest to death, because that was allowed. The rest of the time it was this weight holding him down and this weight he had to maintain and it seemed to much easier to be rid of it. It seemed the most practical thing in the world. Because it couldn't be all of what it was, and Sam still breathing, here, without him?

He didn't know what fifteen meant for Dean, what their father wanted for him. He didn't know Dean dreamed of a future with Sam in a quiet place where God and the devil couldn't find, no bug-eyed locals or tourists. Sam looked for Dean among the tourists in their cabins that morning and couldn't find him anywhere. Sam told John that Dean went to the cabin store down the road to get powdered eggs and water; that he would be back soon. He didn't say he hadn't seen Dean all morning; didn't say he'd seen Dean open the cabin door at midnight, the night sky blacker than his shadow, and walk through it.

So Dean was still gone at ten, still gone at noon. John had stopped speaking to Sam long before that, as soon as Sam came back from the store to check on him, empty handed. He held up his hand to strike Sam, shaking with the fury of God himself - red, God was, and angry, like Sam was, but weaker and bare - and Sam was unafraid. In the absence of Dean there was revenge, there was a cleansing purity, and Sam felt as if he were walking on light, he might as well have been on the moon.

Dean returned, walking through the campsite after supper, and he was so pale he was almost blue. His clothes were wet and his skin clammy, but he would never say where he'd been, not in all the years Sam would know him. "Dean? Dean!" Sam's pleas went unanswered. "Were you abducted by aliens?" he whispered. "Where'd you go, huh?" But Dean never said. He swallowed up the secret of his fifteenth birthday like he swallowed so many others. Sam never asked him the question he wanted to ask most of all, knowing even still that Dean hovered between life and death that night, between some kind of choice too awful to mention. And why'd you come back?

Dean spent the next three days in a fever in the backseat of the Impala. Sam sat curled up in the seat next to his father, neither of them speaking unless John had orders to give, or Sam had to ask about Dean's condition. Sam listened to Dean's breaths cut ragged and unsteady in the air in his feverish dreams, he listened to the snake hiss and uncoil in his own chest, and thought the voice of God had left them for good, his daddy's faith shaking in his hands against the steering wheel, scared eyes focused on the windshield, and he wanted to smile, somewhere down deep and cold as the lake.

*

Badlands 1994

John said they were headed for the desert soon as Dean's fever broke. He had been driving East, towards the Badlands to see a preacher. Sam dreaded it like he dreaded every plan in John's head, but he stayed silent and waited for Dean to be okay.

The preacher was tall and thin, like a skeleton covered with skin, and his eyes were a washed-out blue. Sam hated to look at him and the preacher took it as a sign that the devil was afoot. "Watch that one," he warned, "I can see it coiled within him, wanting to strike."

Dean was better now, but he stayed in bed, surrounded by prayer. Crosses hung on the wall at the preacher's house, rosaries on the bed knobs, sheets with embroidered eyelets and dried lavender on the night tables. Sam wanted to stay with him, never leave his side, but John was giving him tasks to do - cook, sweep the floors, wash the car - and dust covered everything, covered him the moment he stepped out onto the porch, whipping across the Badlands.

As soon as John was gone with the preacher to the church in the morning, Sam would put down his work and rush to Dean's side, kneel at his bed and talk to him, faces close together. Dean said he was cold so Sam would remove every layer of dusty clothing, his sneakers, socks, jeans, pullover and undershirt, climb under the covers and cling to his brother's body. They would rub their bodies together without pretense, Sam rubbing Dean just to feel, all about skin and warmth and things he didn't have the words to say. Sam couldn't find release, those times when he was hard all the time and didn't know what to do about it, and Dean knew that in the way Sam moved against him, hard and unsure and constant, constant rubbing, the way he knew his belly felt best, softest against raw skin, Sam's mouth at his temple. Dean was afraid to talk because he knew too much, and he withheld from Sam, wanted to keep him separate, but Sam was alone and had no one else. He was so smart, so sharp, and Dean couldn't bear to leave him alone with this, all the world Sam opened up for him, to leave Sam in the dark with an ever-aching body. He was trying to be so brave, as his breath came out as a whine against Dean's skin, his hips never stopped jerking, him wanting so much more but not even knowing what to ask for. Dean would think, and think, and think, and think of someone else, anyone else, who could help Sam, teach him and understand him, until he couldn't bear the thought of it and his mind went blank. All Sam had was John and Dean, and Dean found he couldn't think of Sammy and John in the same sentence anymore, the same thought or picture. They were like two separate worlds that couldn't even exist together in Dean's brain, like a short-circuit when he tried to connect them. Sam's sweat on his skin and his sobs right in Dean's ear, the jerking in his hips out of control. "Oh, Sammy, Sammy," Dean whispered in a kiss against the sweat at the top of his brother's spine, and his dry lips tasted of salt.

Dean flipped them over, moved over Sam's body and let his own small, snub-tipped hardness drag against Sam's belly. He kept their breaths close, their mouths close, as he lined his body up with Sam's, opened enough to let Sam peek through and thrust until he was captured inside Dean's body, half inside, half caught between Dean's flesh where he placed Sam's hands, his fingers pressing Dean close and closed around his hips, letting Sam hold him and thrust into him from below, forcing Dean's body to control his movements with his weight and his heat. Dean moved his body down and took Sam inside.

Sam's mouth was an O, his nostrils, his breath wild, like his body, writhing as if possessed - dirty, wrong, Sam thought, dirty, wrong - but Dean made him finish with his body and his breath at his shoulder and Sam's breath was at his shoulder and they shouldn't have fit together like this but they did. He didn't have to ask where Dean learned that. He knew, and the thought of it made him shudder, like Dean's body here, right now, disgusted him. Right then Sam couldn't imagine anyone wanting it to be this way, but for the rest of his life he would, he would - Dean's hands smoothing the sweat over his hair and letting Sam slap their bodies together the only place they're not skin and bones, just sweat and heat, sweet suction and warmth until it can't go anywhere but burst out of Sam in a slow, sweet flood, and everything about them here right now is surprise and new and overwhelming.

"You're okay, Sammy, okay," Dean breathed hot against his skin and petted him, some kind of love rimming his eyes in red as he did so. "You don't have to leave."

"Dad," Sam said, "Dad." And God, Sammy thought, God but didn't know what he meant. He got dressed fast then, uncoordinated and lanky and messed up - so many things, so messed up - but he found his socks and his dusty clothes on the floor where he'd left them, like a skin he'd shed that no longer fit. He heard the front door close, "Sam? Why aren't you outside?" John called through the house. He pulled on his shoes and ran out the backdoor and kept running, his feet feeling like they were miles beneath him.

He knew what Dean meant now and it was what he had always meant and it didn't make any more sense now than it ever did, like the fire his mama left for him and the useless words his daddy kept saying.

There was nowhere to hide out there, where he was running. Wherever he went, Dean followed him like a ghost. He could run in circles over the earth, but not the dark madness of the Wendigo. No, this was not a hunger, but a need all the same. It wasn't hiding - there was nowhere to hide out here, among the dust and the Badlands. Just the dying of the light and the howling wind, like being stripped away except for his voice, and Dean's voice like it called now from the house, telling him to run, run faster.

Sam thought, Why? Why? Why was he running, always running? What was Dean facing when he was not there, what else wasn't he seeing when he thought his life was so small and closed-in like a cage? But that cage was Dean now, and Dean was everything.

Sam imagined his father beating Dean with his angry red God hands, the preacher laying hands in the air, saying meaningless words like the howling wind, the angry red bruises on Dean's flesh bringing tears to his eyes like the stinging wind, all of it howling in his ears, around the peace in the center of his chest and his body, sitting like a stone in Sam's stomach, Dean's perfect flesh, flashing inside his eyelids when he stared at the sun and closed his eyes.

If Sam were to go, Dean would follow him like a ghost, all their flesh lost to the wind. What if we can't get away? Sam ran to the edge of town, the end of the street, beyond the last edge of fence. The road led to the horizon, to where the dust covered it from sight. There was nothing else beyond the stones, the ridges of dirt. He ran back across the street, til the fence stopped. The other side of town, the church and the house. This was it, he thought - Sam is finally a ghost. Dean is a ghost. We will run in circles forever across the earth, and no one will know we are ghosts, but us.

At dinner that night, John spoke of taking them to the desert, for a fresh start. Where they can't run away, Sam thought, and said nothing. There were many to convert out there, many who were willing to believe. He will give Sam work to do. And Dean. They will work, start to earn their keep, and God will open up to them all the value of the world.

*

Route 66 1994-1996

John's ambition grew with the desert heat and his thoughts turned towards Los Angeles, its romantic name, its selective commerce. He drove their one-car caravan towards the coast, past one million billboards of the highway painted with giant pictures of ice cream, hamburgers, golfing retirees and girls wearing silk and pigtails and cherry red lipstick. They ate at burger stands painted up to look like they had stood there since John's childhood and watched people walk the streets dressed up in expensive logos he no longer recognized.

John had been showing Dean pictures, ever since he was young - not young now that he could be prettied up like those girls in the billboards, a new design to build fantasies on, something slowing changing into what he did not know. Like every man, John knew, he had a collection, passed down from father to son, as it should be, to create something new out of pink skin to build a life of dreams upon.

Dean had been quiet and moody since the desert, bothered by ideas Sam had no doubt put in his head, the way Sam could be so difficult, so unloving and cruel, not a part of this family the way John hoped. But John wouldn't lose hope for his youngest son; he knew how much he meant to Dean, how much he wanted Sam to mean for himself. John didn't know that Dean loved the boys and girls who looked like Sammy the best. He didn't know how that made Dean feel trapped and free all at once, grateful, loyal in a sideways way to his dad for reaching into the secret places of himself and telling him what to do with all of this desire - hide it and keep it and turn it on and turn it away. He can't turn away now. John needs him. They've all been doing what this city does best - taking away the shame of the world by finding new ways to make more. The bees follow Dean wherever he goes.

The woman John found in the pastel houses of Santa Monica was good at her job. She made her bread and butter snapping head shots in black and white or color, good at making faces look dramatic and inviting in 4x6 or 8x10. She made the rest of her money creating website content at her customers' request, the spare rooms of her house decorated with generic couches and beds with changing covers. Her specialty was making generic things look special enough to look twice at - she worked wonders with the current deluge of twink models, softening them up and capturing something of a wounded soul, natural light in their eyes, free of hair gel and earrings, rounded asses more Hollywood glam and less bubble gum. The 90s were not even halfway over and the trends were taking their toll on her. She fought her own private battle against the masses.

"I want Sammy to stay," this boy had said, speaking about his brother. She assumed he was his brother - there was some love still in those shadowed, narrowed eyes, still cruel like only a twelve year old could be. John didn't seem happy about it, but parents weren't allowed - that was a rule. Parents could bring them here but she wouldn't have them watch. That might have been the rules deeper down in the valley, but there was a reason she'd left, and it wasn't going to happen here. She could give the models that much.

"Alright, he can stay. Just stand behind me, okay," she spoke to the younger boy, more relaxed now with the father gone. She gave Dean a worn pair of jeans to wear and a white undershirt, comically similar to what he had been wearing anyway, but these jeans were distressed to look trendy and acid washed, not softly worn through at the thighs and torn to shreds at the knees, this undershirt was bleached white against his desert tanned skin and freckles, not stained and wrinkled with no hope of recovery. Dean had that desire to please she was so familiar with, a tilt to his head to show he was listening, a wide-eyed look to show he was thinking, a worry to his lips to cover up the rest. He would be beautiful whether he was trying to show it or not, despite any attempt to cover it up, despite all the reasons he might have wanted to. She knew whatever had happened in the past was already too much to let pass - this boy could never run far enough away from it, or float high enough away - but she could give him this moment of physical proof, here in this room with his brother, a sea-foam green couch, fake marble and venetian blinds, to at least see something beyond his grumbling bear of a father (she knew the type) and thousands of miles of highway traffic.

Without being asked, Dean looked straight at his brother, right behind her, just over the lens of her camera, and just like that his eyes turned to cats-eye green marbles, his lashes seemed weighted down with emotion, his freckled skin blushed like a peach, and she couldn't have painted it better if she had been giving all the colors of the Venice sunset. Her camera clicked. "Lay on your stomach. Scoot up a little. That's good." She focused her lens on his face - where his eyes, nose, and lips just pinched together - and the waistband of his jeans where it just met the curve of his ass before trailing back over the bubbles and bows of his legs, his soft, peanut-toed feet resting on the pillows. Perfect. "You're good at this," she wanted to say, but not in front of his brother, not now, not this boy. It would ruin whatever he thought he was doing, because whatever he thought he was doing, it was not this. It was something real and beyond her grasp, like only the real ones were. She knew it in the numbness of her jaw, the tingle of her palms.

"Good, Dean." Thank you, Dean. "Good. Good." She clicked her camera.

When Dean changed back into his familiar clothes, he took his brother's hand and kissed him on the temple. "That was for you, Sam. I was only good for you," he whispered, the light still in his eyes.

Sam hadn't asked for any of it, and never wanted it - that was the way he saw Dean in his mind, for him, not in a photograph or billboard or big screen movie - but he held himself back from cringing at his brother's kiss, because he wanted him still, just never in the way he was allowed to. "Dean...," he began, trying not to let his voice shake, "Dean." Somehow he found the words no one else could say. "Um, thanks. I... that was pretty. It was pretty because it was you. It looked like you."

Dean huffed out a laugh, "It was me, silly. It's always me."

No, it's not. Sam didn't say. It's not.

They saw the first billboard on the way to Kingman, traveling back past the desert on old Route 66. The truckers' route, their dad had said. Winchester Ministries, the billboard read in simple font, black letters: "And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him." - Genesis 1:7. The words floated above and below Dean's prone body, his welcoming form, his rapturous face, just this side of indecent, the face of all advertising.

John pulled over, whooping, and the boys climbed out of the car, faces stony and silent. "What do you think?" John called, looking between their faces and the sign, lit up even in the daytime. "We're going cross-country, nationwide."

Dean's eyes blinked with the passing of cars on the highway, like the world was moving too fast for him to keep up. "It's nice. I look nice, don't I?" His voice dull and toneless. "Sammy?"

But Sam was turned around, trying to clear his mind of the sight of Dean's freckles as big as his hand, his lips toned-down red and big enough to walk through, knowing he would see it again and again, ripping his heart out on the highway when he least expected it, for thousands upon thousands of miles.

John took them for sundaes at Denny's, whipped cream with a cherry on top, when the desert became too hot to breathe.

They stopped the next day outside of Flagstaff, at a diner with open faced gravy sandwiches and toy trains going round and round over their heads. John kept going to the pay phone to make calls, kept flirting with the waitress when she refilled his coffee cup, kept making notes in a leather-bound journal. Sam watched him as subtly as he could, knowing John's mistrusting eyes were on him all the time, and let Dean dip his fries in his half-eaten gravy plate. He couldn't shake the feeling that this, right now, bad as it was, was going to get worse real soon. John was too happy, Dean trying too hard to get them all to eat and sleep and talk like normal, the way he thought he could hold the world together with just his will and his wishes, Dean's biggest conceit. The thing he perhaps loved about him the most, no matter how much he was wrong.

"Dean?" Sam had to try, while John was on the phone. The moments where it might have been possible. He began when Dean's eyes were on him. "What do you think is going to happen? What's he planning, you think?"

Dean shrugged, and Sam tried to hold himself from shuddering with it. "I dunno, Sammy. Nothing that bad. Maybe something good. What'd you say that sign said? Ministries? That's good, Christian stuff, right? Maybe he's changed his mind; gonna settle down in a room somewhere and park the car for awhile. Give us some time to ourselves; just the three of us, all together in the same spot. He says New Orleans, even." Dean turned his attention back to his fries halfway through talking, seeing how Sam's expression fell. "You never believe in nothing, Sammy. Give it a chance, huh?"

"Ready, boys?" John shook the booth as he returned.

"For what?" Sam said, sharp and flat. "The Grand Canyon?"

John ignored him. "We're going to Winslow. Truckers' paradise. Lots of nice people. You'll see."

Giant plateaus greeted them on the way to Winslow, signs for some kind of petrified forest, dusty trucks leading both ways into the horizon. They got two hotel rooms, one next to the other, a bathroom in between, next to the showers and the 24-hour diner at a truck stop just outside of town. The walls inside and out were white painted wood paneling with curtains made of fabric painted with orange and yellow fruit, with bedspreads to match. The carpets were yellow and smelled of smoke, just like everything smelled of smoke. The whole place was surrounded by a porch with tiny metal stools with all the paint worn off and makeshift ashtrays and spittoons of used cans and metal buckets filled with sand.

Sam hated it. He spent his days reading discarded books that someone had left while passing through - he would ask the front desk every day, go looking at the diner, confiscate newspapers of every kind from the garbage cans and the bathrooms, eventually made some extra cash by cleaning up. He tried to stay in his room, and avoid the adjoining bathroom and bedroom entirely. He considered hitching on the back of a truck just to get away, but he might end up worse off than Dean, with no way out. Or worse. As it was, he tried not to think of Dean as much as possible, tried to focus on the rest of the world that had to be better than this one. As it was, the sound of Dean traveled to meet him wherever he went, his face rose up to greet him in his sleep, and none of it was going to go away.

From what he could tell, the mornings would begin with John reaching out to wake Dean from his sleep next to him, cough his lungs clear and awake, fall over him and break him in, break him open with his morning-hard cock, thrust into him and come in a matter of seconds, his face too red and blurry to feel much else. Sam would awake with his eyes, his face shut against it, not wanting to hear the sound of the bed against the wall, or the struggle of one more dirty man's dirty lungs, but he ached to hear Dean, something from Dean, who was all but lost to him these days. When he heard the shower turn on, he knew Dean was alive and breathing. He would put his ear to the door, too scared to open it, and hear Dean softly sing him a song in a voice just a tone off, just out of tune, over the sound of the weak spray, like some half-drowned mockingbird spent listening to country radio a bit too long.

All he could do was his old habit of obsessively cleaning the car as he had in the desert, once at morning and once at night, as if Dean would still turn to him once at any hour of the day or night, car keys in hand, and say "Let's go". They'd go somewhere far away, refilling with M&Ms and gas until the money ran out, find some other way to live that was not this. The whole time Sam worked his muscles against the paint and the leather and the chrome, he ignored the line on the porch, growing with the day and never shrinking until the quietest hours of the night, when even the stars had gone back to bed. The line of men started at the door and led around the corner and back around, some sitting on the metal stools, some on the ground, some glancing at magazines or just talking, spitting juice on the rotting wood of the porch if they couldn't make the buckets, passing around brown bottles in paper bags, soaking in cigar smoke. They would enter through the white door, let their eyes adjust to the light, to the prone body of his brother, his skin already sweating feverishly, his legs bowed more and more open to greet them, his hole red and sore and soft beyond reason, push once more inside, push down on the bed and its white sheets sweat-soaked clear, push and push and push until Dean would tell them to stop, no more, no more, please, his pleading taking them over the edge one more time.

Sam knew this in the few minutes he was allowed to spend with Dean each day, entering the dim-lit room to clean out the spittoon bucket filled with used condoms next to the bed, to watch Dean shake half-delirious when he touched him, pleading under his breath until he saw his Sammy, begging him with his eyes for something sweeter, soothing with the touch of his fingers behind his ear while Sam stroked him with a cool washcloth, dabbing gently at the bruises, the places where his skin looked rubbed raw to shiny pink. "It hurts, Sammy," Dean whispered, "It hurts," and begged him for something that would help.

But Sam would never find any help in that place, where the trucks moved in both directions towards the horizon. They stayed there until John started making phone calls again, making more notes in his leather-bound journal, started to speak of "other opportunities" down the road that stretched from Chicago to the coast of California. Sam held Dean's head in his lap when John drove them to Albuquerque, his brother drifting in and out of sleep. When Dean spoke, it was only to Sam with mumbled responses and half-gestures, a "Yes-sir" or "No-sir" to John when he asked anything, a dutiful amount of eating and sleeping, just as often saving his food for Sam or when he might feel like eating later, which was never. The desert colors stretched outside the car window - rose purple, sea blue green, yellow orange pink flowers - and Sam thought of his brother's pale face in his lap and though his eyes burned he would not cry.

John was the most frightening in those days, his bright-eyed hope seeming to crush Sam's heart like a vise, and he finally knew that there was no hope here, that John didn't see the world this way, and he and Dean were on their own, not even blessed enough to be alone, but on their own nonetheless. It was a matter of time before he lost Dean for good, to some crazy passerby with a knife, to some infection in the blood, to John's growing madness, like the road eating them whole. John hoped for some future Sam just couldn't see, outside of some monstrous place his vision couldn't go, some place where this was right and normal and agreed with by polite, pleasant stranger's eyes. Though Sam lived in that place, he knew his survival depended on getting far away from it.

The land stretching out towards Amarillo was dry and dusty, but Sam found that the Texas cowboys could teach mercy with their leathery fingers, their bodies spent riding all day with the animals. The men with fitted hats stopped at the truck stop on their way out of town; they treated the waitresses with an agreed-upon politeness, exchanging conversation and a tip for endless cups of coffee and greasy eggs done just as easy as they ask for. Sam followed them out to their trailers sometimes, asking about their animals to see if he could touch. He loved the brown, heavy-lashed balls of horses' eyes, looking wise and kind even though sad. He learned from the way the cowboys touched them with heavy pats followed by soft fingers. Their blue eyes looked out at him from leathery wrinkled skin that spoke to him of kindness as they soothed the horses' wounds with a flower-scented ointment.

"What's that stuff?" Sam asked, putting a gentle curiosity into his voice, more fitting for his twelve years.

"You see those flowers?" The cowboy pointed at the highway and the sunbursts of yellow orange that lined the road. "Them's Calendulas. Like Marigolds. Bloom all over the place."

Sam nodded. "You use flower oil?" He'd read a lot of horse veterinary magazines, explaining how to make tinctures and ointments from beeswax, cocoa butter, Vitamin E oil and flowers with names like Elderberry and Chamomile.

"They used to use this stuff way back in the Civil War, for when the soldiers got wounded. It would keep bad stuff from getting in, help make it feel better and heal faster. Works good for horses too. I made it m'self, back at the ranch. Lots o' different kinds. Easy enough to do."

Sam took some between his thumb and forefinger, smelled it and rubbed it around. It felt good. Natural. "Nice," he said. He felt his pocket for the five bucks he had been saving up to buy Dean something nice. He hadn't known what he was gonna use it for. Not until now. But it seemed like not nearly enough. He bit his thumbnail, tired and worn down to the nub.

"I got some extra. You're welcome to it. I always carry it but haven't used it yet. A little goes a long way." He held out a silver tin with a horse's head on it, looking brown and wise.

Sam let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. "Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Thank you, really. It's... It's a lot."

"Nah, it's nothing. I gotta get on the road though. Maybe I'll see you again. You say you're headed to the show in Oklahoma City?"

"Yeah," Sam remembered, having told a lie about meeting up with his mother at a horse show, his dappled horse called Brownie. "Take care now," he finished, repeating the state goodbye of Texas. Then he took the long way back to the trucker motel and waited for the line to die down, leading back to Dean.

The afternoons were full of bees in Sam's head, flies in the room, while his daddy spent the time in local bars, hanging outside of gas stations, making conversation at the fuel pumps. Dim rooms smelled of flowers, lavender and rose water on his brother's skin, Calendula ointment rubbed into Dean's wounds. Sam was never more careful than when he turned Dean on his side, face and arms pressed into the pillow, knees drawn up to reveal his shiny red and puffy sore places, trusting Sam as the only one who would help him. He wiped at him slow, cleaned what he could with a warm washcloth without going inside, washing away remains of men who wouldn't use condoms, knowing no one would stop them if they didn't, couldn't be the watcher even if his father let him, smoking at the table near the door and counting money. He knew the brush burns of so much hair and skin and sweat still stung at his touch, all along his brother's thighs and the curve of his body, but he had to get them clean, dried with a towel and still stinging red. The ointment was soft and greasy in his fingers, rubbing them together to warm it before starting at the backs of his knees and working downward in tiny circles at anywhere that was red. It wouldn't take long for him to run out, but he'd find a way to get more. There was no part of Dean's body that he could neglect, so much of it already used and neglected, and he would finish with small daubs and circles at Dean's hole, rubbing up inside as far as he could take without pushing, waiting for the tiniest of shudders to signal for him to stop.

Dean turned to him and opened his eyes, calm and grateful and threatened with an exhaustion he didn't want to think about. His face was shiny with sweat from the heat of the afternoon, his lips cracked and dry in contrast. Sam wanted more than anything to find something stronger to help Dean, something to take away all the pain and the memories, especially of Dean's words to him when he used to hope for something better than this. He hoped Dean didn't remember, that his pleas to him now were only for the moment, for a glass of water or some food. Sam took a clean washcloth and squeezed the water over Dean's lips, watched him smooth it over with his tongue before rubbing more ointment with his pinky finger like some lipstick. He fed him fruit from a soft banana, covered his closed eyes with a wet cloth while he chewed, and found a glass of water for Dean's shaky hands.

Sam didn't dare stay long enough for their dad to return, his shame growing strongest at the end, and for the night to come. He left Dean with his eyes closed, sleeping for maybe an hour if he was lucky while night fell, and entered back to his room through the bathroom, his own reflection in the mirror something of a ghoul, colored yellow green by the flickering lights. When he went outside the blue bug light snapped at him, and he watched the lit cigars and dusty boots gather at the porch. He spared them barely a glance, his empty stomach wanting to be sick with it all but long forgotten how, and spent the night trudging back and forth between his bed and the Impala willing to find a quiet place for good, for sleep, but afraid to miss the minute when his brother would finally scream, to see if it would ever come.

The flat lands of Oklahoma looked no different from Texas, acted no different. Sam didn't know why he thought they would, or why things would ever change, but he did, the promises in what he read renewing his faith in what, he wasn't sure, but something out there, waiting. Some nights John never made it to a hotel, stalling out at a bar with his lips wrapped around a bottle, glazed-eyed and genially joking, his voice nothing but a buzz to Sam's ears anymore.

Sam walked the blocks of beaten down saloons outside of Oklahoma City with a knife in his boot, but just walked in circles, never thinking, his brother's name sending his mind into loops that ended in the same place, no different. He ended up walking between his father's voice from inside the wooden door of the saloon, between the darkness of the alley which showed nothing but the shine of glass and chrome, the pale skin of his brother where he hung half in and half out of the backseat of the car, his brother's face a flash in the window, his palm on the glass. As before, Dean had just as likely found it easier to turn around on his belly, hold onto the seat and push off the ground with his toes against the weight of the men on his back, the only bright spots in the alley the skin of his calves as he moved, pumping up and down off the ground, or the shine of his skin when they left, the slippery pile of condoms beside the rear tire, his ass open to the night and the city for as long as it would take.

Sam walked and waited for the bar to close, for John to allow him to collect Dean up in his arms and let him rest there as he drove them someplace else, then forgot, fell asleep behind the wheel in a motel parking lot and gave them peace until sunrise. But it didn't happen. Sam found himself opening the wooden door of the saloon with a bottle in his hand and throwing it at the sound of his father's voice, hard enough to smash and hurt and make another kind of noise, one that might bring him back to his senses and his sanity, lost somewhere out there in the alleys and sidewalks. He didn't know where he'd hit, just that glass exploded in John's hand, spilled out blood and liquor, and then that hand was in his face, gripping his hair and pulling, jerking slippery strands of hair back again to places Sam didn't want to be.

Sam didn't want to be handcuffed to the rear car door, squirming and kicking at the back of the front seat, screaming over the squeal of the tires and the roar coming from his father's head. He didn't want to see Dean naked and curled up around the seat beside him, eyes closed to the world, his placid waiting face. He never wanted John to stop the car in a deserted waiting place, his shoes scuffing angrily in the gravel while he walked around to take Dean again, his tequila-soft cock just hard enough to last, his hairy belly pushing Dean into the seat with no room to move, his grip long enough to reach Sam's face, hiss words into his ear about blame and fire and monstrous boys with monstrous ideas who can't stay away from each other, who taught him all they needed to about what they really needed, each word a violent thrust. All his sons owed him, in the language of violent thrusts.

There were no more secrets then, nothing in John that would quiet the monsters except hours of drinking in Tulsa bars, only to find themselves surrounded again, with the same questions that spoke nothing of getting away, not for years and years. John could have Dean when he wanted and Sam couldn't touch him, not without reprisals and some dark imagined revenge. And John's imagination was limitless. Sam grew to know what it sounded like, Dean against the wall high up off the ground and split by John's cock, the wet sound when John finally came down his throat, the slap of skin when he took him from behind with no preparation, the slick sound of John's hand so fast on his cock that Dean could hardly breathe through the spanking on his ass, the sound of Dean's frustration when John was too drunk to come or let them sleep, the roar in his own head when John was beating either one of them - Sam always harder, more, with nothing to lose and the fear that this time it would not end with just sore bruises, limbs twisted just until, broken fingers and toes, cracked ribs and burning cheeks.

There was a split between them - Sam and Dean - with John threatening to make it wider. Though John blamed them for everything, Sam did not. He saved all of his salve for Dean, anything he had left of hope or concern. Everything else, he saved for John. In his dreams, he imagined poison, quiet stabbings, even fire, that old nightmarish foe he had begun to think of as a friend. He found himself wondering, more than ever, what Dean dreamed about.

The remains of the World's Fair in St. Louis made John full of his circus sideshow ideas again, his need for over-the-top spectacle and flim-flam. Sam thought it was as if the world were full of mad things he'd never known about, things his father had clung to his whole life and never spoken about. In his paranoia, he'd been loading up on guns. When Sam had thought he'd seen them all, he'd find a new one poking out of John's waistband, stashed in the glove-box, piled in with the others in the trunk, next to flares, grenades, boxes of bullets and packets of knives. He'd never been taught to use them; Dean neither. But he found his fingers itching for triggers and pins, blade handles and shiny things, just because John threatened never touch.

"Give up on revenge, Sam." Dean's voice was flat and quiet, his eyes staring out at rows of houses, utterly blank. "I don't want you thinking that way."

He almost thought he didn't hear him right. Didn't think Dean could say that, much less mean it. He looked around instinctively to see where John was, even though he knew he was in the hardware store, behind the glass. "What're you saying?"

"You know what I mean. I don't gotta say it." Dean shuffled on his feet. He looked way younger than seventeen, way older too. It was as if Sam knew how old he should be, and none of it seemed right. "Just, forget it."

"Or what?"

"Or I'll stop you. That's what."

"You can't... You can't be serious?"

"I'm your older brother and that's how it's gonna be."

Sam felt sick to his stomach, to hear his father's words come out of his brother, to feel his rage redirect itself at Dean, burning twice as hot, white-hot, acid. "No. No." He spat. All the weapons in the car were not enough, would never be enough. He flashed back to his brother lighting a cigarette in the desert.

It finally dawned on him that this was how it was. Dean would never leave while John was alive, would never see things for how they were. That maybe he was as deluded as John was, only clouded, only frail. Dean's bravery was a front; the thing Sam relied on most in the world, the only thing, had never existed. He had been the delusional one. He had been wrong. "Dean," he spoke one last time.

Dean never turned his head.

Sam ran towards nothing that night, just away. When he heard the trains whistle, he ran towards them. He couldn't hear a sound beyond the trains, and never stopped until he was at the doorstep of a woman who said her name was the same of the state he was in, who said she knew how to hide from dangerous things, and much more besides. The years were lost again - three years Sam left Dean to John that he could never take back forever after.

*


	3. Olympic Rainforest 1999 - Disney World 2010

Olympic Rainforest 1999

Missouri got Sam back into school; it had been years. He worked odd jobs to pay her back, kept to himself in the meantime, away from her other boarders who had stories of their own he couldn't take on, not on top of everything else. He broke easily in those days, and was itching to move. When Ruby found him, he knew she was different. Her daddy was rich and spent his summers on a yacht. And she had a plan, held it in her pocket - a plump, picked cherry, filled up with a drug - "like liquid X, like euphoria in a bottle" - called GHB. Club kids used it, she said, and gay jocks, so it was harmless. Worked better than morphine. So, do you need a job?

Sam was picking cherries in the Olympic rainforest when Dean found him, the summer after his senior year in high school. It was a hot and sticky June. Two months before Stanford; minutes since he'd last thought of his brother.

Sam smoked joints in the wooden shacks the pickers slept in, passing them around and keeping their stashes close, until the sky looked a cartoon blue with cartoon clouds, the red dots of the cherries like shiny red ants, the bees singing a song in their own kind of stereo. Sam could speak Spanish, just as often said nothing at all. He could get lost in the memories so easily, all the ones he had where John didn't exist and Dean stared back at him from a frame where the edges were never in focus.

Dean found him on foot, backpack over his shoulder, shoes worn, wearing John's old jacket, tracking through the mud and walking out of the mist like the ghost he was.

"Hey, Sammy."

"Where are you?" Sam asked it stupidly. As if Dean wasn't right there. As if none of this was happening.

Dean didn't answer, afraid to break the spell.

Sam had plans, lots of plans, all crumbling now. "Dean." He said, "Dean."

In the dark fields at night he would find him under silvery light, waiting. He would be exhausted but there was never an end to them. They ate ripe cherries plump with GHB - the ones Sam kept in a box, waiting, how he'd learned from Ruby - until Sam felt as hard as his anger, his body taut as a science-warped superhero, his sex neverending. He felt Dean's euphoria in his bones, as he had as a child, Dean's eyes and lips shiny and full of light, his legs hugging him tight, and they floated over the treetops and far away.

*

Gulf Coast Highway 2001

Dean was scary when he was eighteen. John more sick than not, Dean was left to wander alone for hours at a time, wielding himself as a tool on the unexpected. He seemed at home any place where there were swarms of mosquitoes, trees hung with clumps of moss, roots that crept over the earth seeking out water.

Every time Sam went to visit him, he was a different kind of scary. But Sam loved him, even the ways he frightened him, and they would never have the chance to change, or be any different. Most nights they wandered the docks at the shore, the neon-lit French Quarter streets, the casino boardwalks smoking cigarettes and eating cherries, passing tiny sips of Old Granddad between them until they collapsed against a concrete wall in some warehouse district, some marina, some graveyard. Cherries passed Dean's lips like jewels. Some nights he would curl up next to Sam and hold onto his muscled arm like a life preserver, sometimes he would get lost again and fuck himself onto unconsciousness, sometimes he would just talk - for the first time, talk.

"Dad blamed us for the fire." Dean's back was to the brick wall of the alley, his knees bent and supporting his collapsing weight, too euphoric and numb to care. He gestured with the bottle until Sam took it away - Sam listened, always listened, like Dean was telling a story they had both lived but neither fully remembered. "You were a baby, and I was four and I know it doesn't make sense. None of this will ever make sense, Sammy, and I get so tired of trying."

"Shhhh, Dean, shhhh," Sam wanted to reach out and close Dean's lips with his fingertips, but every touch sent them rolling against each other, falling again, crawling and falling.

"So what if it was true? All I remember is always loving you, with the worst kind of love, a precious kind, I don't know what kind. You remember. You remember what I mean. So what if I showed you what I shouldn't have? It was what I knew." Dean reached out his hands to touch Sam's face anyway, the touch sending them both into closed-eyed reverie, wanting more and groaning with it. "I always wanted to show you all that I knew, and hide from it forever. To show you and hide from you everything. This thing - it wasn't just Dad. It was something I had, and just didn't know what to do with." Dean opened his eyes. "You understand. You understand, right, Sammy? It was always so close and," Dean stuttered on his feet. "Sammy."

"Shut up, Dean. Just stop. Stop." He stuttered too, with his thoughts and his voice.

Dean tried to be clear, barely on his feet. "No, I gotta say this. You know. Sammy. What I did to you."

He didn't know. Didn't know any different. Dean's earnestness was killing him. "I don't blame you."

"You should, Sammy. I'm saying you should. I mean we both were there and I don't know how to stop it, even now."

Sam wanted to cry, but each rub of Dean's thumbs under his eyes were all he ever wanted. "I wanted to run away from him. I wanted you to come with me."

"How would that have worked, Sam? And you still have all this? School and a future and something more. It's so much more than what I got."

"I'm sor..." He couldn't say it, broken with a sob, pressing his eyes into his brother's thumbs.

"No, it's not that. Not that at all. I'm glad for it. I wouldn't change it to have you back."

"Dean."

"Because I never could have you." Dean let his brother's weight fall into his arms, brought them both down to the ground. "You weren't mine. I know that now. And it's okay."

"It will never be okay." Sam let him, and curled up between Dean's knees, their dirty jeans, his fingernails.

"No, Sammy, listen to me. It's okay. It's okay. I'm glad for it."

"Shit," Sam sobbed. Never thought he would stop sobbing.

"Don't cry. That's not what I want. I want you to never cry, ever again. Sammy. Sammy." Dean cooed his name and held his head between his thighs and petted his hair and the back of his shirt.

Sam held onto his thighs for dear life and sobbed, wiping his jeans wet and pressed his forehead against the places in Dean he didn't want to matter, because he'd most wanted to save, while Dean let his body float up to the stars and willed Sam's sobbing to slow with his steady breaths, his heartbeat calm and steady like the turn of the earth, like they were all alone, just as they wished.

Before he left, Sam bought a manual on boating, left Dean another crate of cherries to share with his acquaintances, and hitched back to California.

The Winchester Ministry had changed with John's own madness - no longer able to control his sons as he once had, he focused his control on illuminating the mysteries of evil in the country, the loss of faith, the plague of demons. For Dean, it was blues, drugs, and sex; same demons, different time and place. In the smoke haze, between Sam's visits, he thought he could see angels in the way the lamplights hit the trees, in the fog off the water at morning, in the streets at dawn.

*

Rust Belt 2001

That winter Sam worked outside of Pittsburgh, a night shift at the factory with a fake ID and SSN, florescent light, finding a family to sleep with in the parking lot when he was too drunk to move. He found his family bled. Wanting to hit the men in hats, dark wigs and sunglasses, plaid work shirts and boots, who said nothing. the men who talked of pussy loud enough for the women to hear. Wanted to touch the women's smooth faces who denounced crack as the devil's poison, but always sounded wistful and tired.

Food came from slots in machines, white bread yellow cheese under electric lights. He listened to stories of a thousand bad boyfriends, one hundred prostitution attempts, years in jail and run-ins with the cops hilarious or sad, but most often both. Money was hard to come by. Sam had plans he bartered in cherries.

Sam would have sold his soul if he'd had one, not to have to go back. But the Winchester ministry took a bad turn last fall, when John's demons began to take the form of regular tourists, his guns getting hot and itchy against his skin.

Sam had driven a truck to Chicago with them for the summer and then he'd left again, on his own. Sam rode in the front while John drove, the Impala hidden in the back. Sam knew if it weren't for Dean, he would have just leave his father to fester and rot. But Dean, as always was caught in his web, in trouble again. He sat quiet in the back, ate cherries, and slept.

Sam remembered picking lice and fleas from his brother's scalp years ago, Dean naked in the back seat in summertime and trying not to cry. His nails clicked and scraped together, the pop of each dead flea when they broke between his fingernails, the soft beauty of even ugly things when they touched Dean.

Sam remembered the last time Dean left him in the rainforest, how Dean had turned to him shiny-eyed and full of kisses and Sam had felt as empty as the moon. The thing always was, for all the times Sam had turned away from his brother, he could never remember why, and always seemed to regret it every second that was not that moment of looking down, looking away and dropping his hands and curving his back to hide a cringe he could no longer feel. He was afraid sometimes he would break Dean if he touched him, and more often he was afraid that he would not.

Sam learned trucking, but he was too young to get his commercial license and cross the state lines. His growth seemed stunted by the weight on his shoulders, the deadness in his eyes. Sometimes he hitched, armed with knives, just waiting for something to cut. He listened to the ubiquitous porn on portable DVD players and stared out the window at all the cars and wondered how they didn't all collide like so many climaxes of violence.

*

Chicago 2003

"My name's Ruby. Like the cherries. You can remember that." He'd met up with her again outside the border in Washington, the summer he was 17. He'd met several Rubys since then, the brunette who fed him his first one, told him what was inside. The blonde who asked him for favors, was always coming up with new plans. Different women, same name, all offering him gifts.

By the time he got to Chicago he was willing to do the work for them, whatever it took, but he wasn't old enough to drive alone without attracting attention. He could ride passenger, take care of logistics, work for protection and guard the supply. They just as often left him in places like St. Louis, Chicago, Seattle when things got rough.

He was working to coordinate the lines when the shipment came in from Vancouver, from London, from Bombay. It was liquid, looked like water, and still legit in the UK. It had only started to attract attention in the U.S. when it jumped from the gym culture to the party culture, and a girl had passed out from alcohol poisoning, never to wake up, with some GHB in her system. There was a window, Ruby had said. Act now or the window's gone. Take it or leave it.

Sam remembered the years before when he'd taken some home for Dean, to feed him some euphoria to ease the pain, the ruby red cherry passing his lips so gratefully for both of them. It was so much easier to say yes to her than he would have thought, his loyalty to any help he'd ever had coming off of him in waves. Yes, he'd said. Yes, help me. Give me means to help others, get enough money to get the both of them out, leaving nothing behind, and repay the favor you once showed me. Yes, he told her, spent days in her apartment soaking trucked-in cherries - from border wineries, from the California coast, from Oregon - in a bathtub full of illicit clear liquid, loaded them into crates, into his truck and drove to Chicago.

She'd been shipping crates to him for years, just enough to spread them around, feed them past Dean's lips, have enough to offer at raves, build a clientele at gyms for blending into smoothies undetected. He made most of his money those summers between semesters, faking his CDL and driving as much as he could before the laws changed, like Ruby said they would, the windows closing forever.

He showed her his gratitude, tasting the supply and feeling the crystal liquid make his whole body hard, his muscles showing definition for the first time, his sex spreading her lips with impossible hardness, all growing to euphoria. This, he thought, this is what freedom will feel like.

*

Oregon Trail 2004

Sam had been hiking the Oregon Trail to get clean, with no success; it was the week after exams, when Dean showed up. Dean looked older now, all traces of fat and softness gone, lines around his eyes and darker freckles appearing. He wasn't lean and muscular like Sam was, just tired - Dean had always cared more about his pain anyway than his appearance, each of them picking out just enough of their lives to manage, and failing all the same. His smile was small and taut. Something had gone wrong - he could tell. Something big enough to crack through and finally get to Dean, and a shiver went up Sam's spine at the thought of that. Sam felt he'd spent years asking himself the same question over and over. Who are you? There had been no beginnings of an answer until now.

"Hey, Sammy."

"Dean. How... what are you doing here?"

"I brought the car. Fixed it up real nice."

Sam didn't know what he meant. "Okay. Okay, that's good."

"Yeah. Took me a few months."

"Is that what you've been doing? Just fixing the car?"

"Pretty much." Dean nodded, then nodded again, answering some question Sam didn't ask.

Then he told Sam a story of how John had died.

*

Rockies 2004

The snow was already falling when they began it. John had wanted to make Coeur D'Alene by nightfall, but Dean knew he would drive as long as it took. His father's fever was muted now, as if even he didn't believe in his plans anymore, gone soft the way spoiled things do, and not like hearts. Still, Dean waited for some kind of an ending, some moment to strike that would set him free for good. When he thought about it, staring out the window at the ground going white, that's all he could see - whiteness that covered the whole sky and the ground to the edges of his vision, a great blankness to blanket them all in an ending that he couldn't seem to find.

As it was, the moment struck sometime past Hells Canyon. So much of the land was emptiness and quiet reservations that seemed filled with lonely houses and abandoned trucks in yards, old clotheslines and piles of wooden boxes, stacked tires. There were people there he never saw. But there were rusted windmills topped with snow and hills they passed without seeing. The last town was two hours back, the next unknown. They had driven this land before, together, sometime long ago, and as always it never looked the same, not even when they passed it the next day going back to find a town they had passed, turning back when over an hour had gone by and there was no other sign of fuel or lodging. Dean remembered what that was like when he was young, when he had stopped trusting their father not to leave them stranded for the night, and he could only pray silently to himself that they would make it to the next town, or the last one they had passed, when every sign said empty.

When the blurry brown form of the elk moved into the road, they were going over sixty. Dean thought it was the biggest elk he had ever seen, bigger even than the one he had spotted that winter before his eighth birthday. Its brown humps were dusted with snow, its eyes not even shining in the headlights. John had one hand gripping the wheel, his eyes squinting at the utter darkness and the bright shine of the snow, his jacket the only protection against the cold. Dean felt the freezing dashboard with the fingers of his left hand, his mouth open to speak words he would never say. Wind-blown snowflakes hovered in the light like insects. All of this he saw in the moment before the collision.

After that there was nothing but the space of the breath he tried to hold in his chest and the sound of hard glass, metal, and bone smashing. When he opened his eyes there was silence and darkness. Okay, he thought, the part of him still breathing all calm and peaceful, each breath peaceful. At the same time his thoughts racing - Dad, fire, dead, Sam, car, Dad, ice, help, help, help - like a child, panicking. Okay. Peaceful breath like the snow. Dean crawled towards the coldest part, his hands numb and wet from blood or ice, he did not know. Time meant nothing, had meant nothing for longer than he knew. He crawled until he saw the stars, the world suddenly upside down. No, the car. He should stand up, start walking, he thought. Walking towards the next town. Which was what? What? And in which direction? The stars were so few, even though the snow had stopped. When had the snow stopped? He hadn't seen it happen. Dad had a cell phone in his pocket. Dad. He should see about Dad. First, cell phone, the help, and someone else's voice.

He kept his hands on the car, as if he would lose it in the darkness. The undercarriage was already covered with snow. How long had it be laying on its back? How long mangled? How long his father's arm outside the car? The shiny dark elk flattened on the road? Dark wetness stretching out between the engine and the driver's side door? He found his father's jacket before he found his face but the phone was in the jacket and said "No signal" with its green face. In the glow he saw dark wetness and knew his father was upside down like he was. Okay, frost-colored breathing. He would pull his father out of the car - that was first. First, find his father's face, bent against the roof and check for warmth and breathing. Find enough there to keep moving, stick with the plan. Find a way to pull him free, no matter if his arm hangs loose at the shoulder and stiff at the wrist, if his legs get stuck again and again on sharp things that make your fingers slippery. Lay him out on the ice on the road and get ready. Spread all four limbs out and crouch between his legs. Pull him up to sitting by his jacket, his shoulders, his arms, and keep trying if this does not work. Turn around until you feel his weight at your back, his head falling over your hair, and heave him forward - though you can't, though you can't feel your legs beneath you, or even the coldness of the air - until you can feel his jeans beneath your hands - can't feel your hands behind you - and get up, get up, get up. Repeat this until it works - you don't know how many times until it works - and stagger forwards down the road where the ice cracks beneath your feet, and not where the snow is soft and inviting and warm. Then walk.

Walk.

Walk.

When the first pickup truck passed, Dean was ten miles from Coeur D'Alene, though he did not know this. The driver didn't tell him at first, just opened the side door and helped him inside. They lifted John together and placed him between two blankets in the truck bed. Dean never stopped shivering, never seemed to shut his eyes, but when the driver checked his hands for damage, he saw only blood-stained gloves, no frostbite.

As they drove, he asked the simplest of questions. "Was that your car I saw back there?"

"Yes," Dean answered.

"You walked a long way. About sixteen miles I would say."

Dean was silent.

"That's a long way to walk."

The driver waited until Dean was safe in his cabin, and until he got a fire burning, before he called someone at the general store. It was too early for anyone to be there, but he knew everyone else who lived nearby and they knew him. The door was unlocked.

When he returned, Dean was still there. He sat beside him, weary from driving, and felt the warmth seep into his bones. "Was that your father you were carrying?"

"Yes," Dean said, his eyes on the fire.

"I'm afraid he didn't make it. He's been dead, probably since last night."

Dean's nostrils flared just slightly, his eyes leaving the fire to look at his hands for a moment, then back again. "I know," he said.

This was not how Dean told it to his brother that Spring. Sam heard all of it anyway.

*

Wine Country 2005

In the summers, Sam left Stanford for Napa. He knew rich friends there with rich cottages and rich connections, but he still preferred whiskey to red wine, the tannins always tasting to him of blood and things he wanted to forget. Whiskey just helped him to forget.

He forgot so well, so very well, until Dean showed up again. His great year-long ideas for being a pricey escort in San Francisco fizzed out after his business plan went sour, and he found he couldn't even afford the price of the ads in the bay area weeklies. "The competition's kind of stiff there, even for street living," Dean explained between drags of a cigarette, forced onto the back porch and away from the quiet chatter of the party inside. "Besides, I hate California. You can't even smoke here anymore. And this," he hiked a thumb at the glass windows, drunk beyond belief, "counts as a party?"

Sam held onto his anger, willing Dean away with his fake patience. His friends didn't understand Dean. They saw him as cheap and trashy - "so L.A.," Ruby had said - and Sam's anger grew in the wrong direction.

"I dunno, man," Dean shrugged, ignoring his brother's narrowed eyes out of habit. "Sometimes I think all lawyers are possessed by some kind of boring, dickish demon species. You sure you wanna be one of them? I mean, how did you get all of this, Sam? Sell your soul or something?"

Sam scoffed. "No. I'm just good at lying. How'd you get this way, Dean?"

Dean spread out his hands in mock surprise. "Well whadda you know? I'm good at lying, too. Must run in the family, I guess."

"You know what? Fuck you, Dean. Stop expecting me to fix everything, when you've never fixed anything in your life." He opened the door. "I'm going back to the party. You do whatever you want. No, wait - on second thought, don't. Just don't do anything around me, okay?" Then he slammed it.

"Oh no," Dean said, his words honey-sweet, "the party's just getting started," and followed in after. He spent the next two hours asking about the most expensive wines, and then drinking them.

"But I don't understand," Dean said it the first time, really, really wanting to understand. Sam's friends were all doing lines, and Sam, and Dean too, with what was left of what they offered. Sam kept pressing his finger to his head, closing his eyes, leaving the room where Dean was and coming back, not meeting his eyes. Dean had tried to catch him by the arm when he entered the room again, and Sam brushed past him. "Sam. Sammy." Sam brushed past him.

Dean knew, like when John did it, how much easier it was to kill some natural thing than to think about what it was worth. He couldn't blame Sam for it, not really.

*

Four Corners 2006

They had scattered John's ashes together on the Colorado Plateau. It had been springtime then, and Sam had worn a full suit of white with matching patent-leather shoes. Dean had worn a shirt and jeans, having already burned the leather jacket on the res, before his father's body had been taken away.

Sam asked him again - here, now, passing through Four Corners on the way to Vegas - to help him find a way out. His suit was still white, but now he wore snakeskin boots. "We just have to do what we've been doing. I need more money to finish school, and then you never have to work again. We'll be out, free, debt-free. Make a clean break. All of it. I promise."

"Can't we leave it behind us, Sam? And just be us?"

"Almost," Sam said. "Do this one thing for me. That's all I ask."

Dean squinted in the sun. "Give up on revenge, Sam."

"Revenge against whom?" Sam replied.

*

Sierra Nevada 2006

After that, it got ugly. Sam wore his white, sweat-stained suit in hotel rooms with broken air conditioners while Dean went out at night in jeans and found whole bars of men to fuck.

Dean wasn't over John's death, wasn't over any of it. Was Sam? Was Sam? He asked himself in circles again and again what, if given all the world, he wanted to hate so much but couldn't, and why wasn't it his father, and why did it have to be Dean?

It would have been so much easier if Dean had pulled the trigger, crashed that car, found a way to end it that was not natural. In Sam's head, John had been dead for years before he was. Did Dean kill John that way, finally and for good? Did Dean finally do it?

Dean was never so simple. He figured there were so few things in the world that could end him, but Dean was one of them. Sam hated the ugly thoughts he was having, out of nowhere. He wanted Dean free, it was what he'd always wanted. But he wanted Dean to be clean of John for good, not dragged down by the possibilities in Sam's imagination, where Dean was a changeling, a genie made of fire and sent to grant his wishes, but for a price he couldn't name.

*

Pacific Coast Highway 2006

"I had to survive without you," was all Sam could say, though he was the one who ran away - not the first one, but the one who ran for good. He wore his white suit on a yacht that belonged to Ruby's father, his snakeskin boots, dark sunglasses. He let Dean walk around in nothing, his pale skin tanning more even, freckles everywhere but on the lightest parts.

Dean whined for Sam to take him away from Venice Beach, where passersby would stop him on the boardwalk and swear they recognized him from two decades of VHS tapes, DVDs, Internet vids, and billboards, some of which he'd forgotten, some of which Sam actually had the rights to. He asked Sam to take him to studio auditions, said he wanted some legit credit, to make up for lost time. Sam would look at him from behind sunglasses, saying nothing. Just as often Dean remained quiet, walked the beach in jeans - in circles past the gym, the woman in spandex selling rollerblade lessons, the sidewalk artists, the smoke shops with pipes made of glass and gold as tall as his neck, the racks of tie-dyed cotton, signs selling ice cream - walked in circles smoking a joint and letting his lips sunburn and crack pink again.

At night, Sam would hold Dean down under the surface of the yacht, fast against the sheets, and fuck him until one or both of them were bleeding. Their sunburned skin was warm to the touch, their teeth wanted to bite when they kissed, and Sam was frustrated even as he came, pounding the bed, his body and sex hard and taut as a volcano.

Dean touched his thick neck, his arms too big to wrap around, his muscled torso like a brick, and wondered where Sam had gone, and who this man was, all hardness and anger and drug-fueled in a white ice cream suit, on a yacht offshore from Malibu, talking about surviving somewhere where Dean couldn't go. "I had to survive without you too," Dean said, touching his brother's face again. But then that was all Dean ever did.

*

Rio Grande 2009

They gave Dean three years in El Paso for possession back in 2006, having dropped the lesser charge of prostitution, which would have been a matter of days, but Dean was used to selling his soul for his brother, and Sam had only passed the bar in California, so that was that.

Prison felt like home in a way, but the type of home that stayed still, had walls, food to eat, no windows. At night, his El Camino Real angel rose out of the Rio Grande like the Virgin de Guadalupe, and he found himself remembering childhood things, lost things, in exchange for all he had since been allowed to forget.

He met a man named Jimmy Novak who wore a suit and tie every day and asked him if he would pray with him in exchange for the gift of literacy.

"I like true stories," Dean told him. "Where real things happen."

Jimmy thought hard and tried autobiographies and historical fiction until he realized what Dean had meant. "You want to read stories about things you know about. That's what you mean?"

"Yeah," Dean shrugged. "Real stuff."

He didn't know Dean's life, but he knew he'd been all over the place - had somehow gotten to age thirty and didn't know how to read. Jimmy tried Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn - Dean loved the name Huckleberry, and he thought Tom was a hoot - before moving on to Barrie's Peter Pan and Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking and Milne's Pooh, realizing Dean didn't even know simple fairy tales. What Dean did know was comic books, and maybe that's where he got his taste for stories about orphans; Jimmy didn't know. They eventually moved onto siblings, and Dean's favorite ended up being a Southern novel, told by a young girl - To Kill a Mockingbird - but Jimmy always felt his heart break a little bit when he realized that while Dean identified strongly with the older brother, growing up in a world where there were too many to save and compassion was a rare commodity, he mostly identified with the pale ghost next door, Boo Radley.

Across the country, across the world, Sam got clean for real, devised a plan to get as much of Ruby's money as he could, and moved out for good. It was his turn to save Dean for real this time - no more childhood fantasies about running away and being free and becoming something else. He was going to be Sammy - indeed, he had always been, would always be Sammy - and save his big brother, just as Dean had always tried to save him, in the only way he knew how. He headed to the Rio Grande to study Texas law, exchanged the smog of southern California for the smog of the border, rediscovered himself as thin and sharp this time, long-haired again, like a teenage girl with big feet, pink lips, a white dress for the quinceanera, though he was over a quarter of a century old.

*

Roswell 1992

Dean thought the plastic aliens for sale were pretty weird, but he knew Sam believed that the Enterprise was a real place and that he secretly wished to be Betazoid, with a teal asymmetrical neckline bodysuit and dark black eyes and the ability to empathize with everyone he met. He figured Sam already had the last part down, with his knack for knowing what Dean was thinking, even if Dean didn't know himself.

His little brother fingered the glow-in-the-dark alien heads. "Do you think it's real, Dean? An alien was here? You think he was treated nice?" Sam's mouth was pouty, his pink lipgloss smelling of cherry and sugar, his hair long enough to shove behind his ears when he was thinking about the happiness of galactic travelers.

Dean just shrugged with his eyebrows. "Yeah, Sammy. Real nice."

Sam was innocence and trust with a superhero backpack. Sam was true. Dean wanted to believe his fantasies instead of his own, all the time. He wanted to take Sam onto some alien spaceship far away from here on a mission of peace and justice, pretending all such things existed.

Then Dean found the perfect thing. "Hey, Sammy - look at this." He picked up a metal ring with a blue stone stuck on top. "Give me your hand."

Sam did as he was asked. He always did, for Dean. "What is it?" He turned the blue stone over on his finger.

Dean smiled, bigger and bigger all the time, remembering all the rings he'd given Sam over the years. And why? Why did he always want to give Sam a ring? "When you wear it, it changes color. See? That way, everyone knows what you're feeling - happy, sad, angry, whatever."

Sam frowned, just a little. "Don't you already know what I'm feeling, Dean?"

His brother always asked questions like that, scaring him with his honesty. It made him want to be true for Sam. It was a real thing - the difference between imagining stupid spaceships in the sky and impossible happy aliens and a true world and feeling that they were real enough to touch. "Well, yeah, Sammy, I know it. You know I do."

"Okay, then. I love it." Another ring for Sammy's graceful, fragile fingers, the only rings he would be given and the only ones he would ever want.

*

Great Plains 1983

On the Kansas prairie, a childhood fire blazed, tongues licking at the walls. A mother tried to save her sons, tried to love them, as her family died and went bankrupt. Her gown went up first, her hair, the paint on the walls bubbling, photos on the wall curling in on themselves. Her sons heard shrieking and howling and the sound of wood splintering. What Mary meant was rage without denial, regret for losing all, love beyond speech.

The documents said: unstable maternal figure, fire insurance coverage lapse, bankruptcy. John believed them all when he finally had to. But he also believed in the reformation of little boys, man's evil fate, infant curses.

Dean, in turn, did what he would always do, and carried his brother out of the fire.

*

Yellowstone 1994

They drove the only road going north to Yellowstone, and Dean wanted to spend it in the backseat with Sammy. With every beautiful thing, he wanted to spend it with Sammy. They traded candy wordlessly in their small hands, saw the same sights with the same eyes, acknowledging together the fields of purple wildflowers - vivid bright, not lilac like Sammy's skin - the sky a shallow blue, the mountains a cold blue and the Tetons snow-capped, the bees noisy with stripes yellow and black they could see when they opened the car doors. The only other sound was the water from rushing streams, heading towards a waterfall somewhere far away.

The days seemed to last forever, the sun high in the sky at dinnertime when they ate granola bars and sodas on a paint-peeled picnic bench. The trees grew tall, clinging to gray rocks; the air smelled of sulfur and pine - a playground for devils and angels; water boiled and steam rose from pools deeper than Dean could imagine, far past black, and colored the ground bright orange and teal - this place strange and unreal.

"Come 'ere, huckleberry," Dean called his brother after the purple berries that grew all over Wyoming and Montana. "You make me kind of crazy, you know? Like a little brother's supposed to." He had to squint in the sun and keep Sammy close. It was all he wanted.

They walked in the sun. They wouldn't leave each other alone - past alien landscapes weirder than Sammy's TV shows, past trees dead from sulfur, past waterfalls that dropped beneath them into sparkling valleys. Dean and Sammy. Sammy and Dean.

The clouds made shadows on the mountains. The water flowed blue. Pines stretched to the horizon. Rapids looked like clouds, spilling rainbows over green moss-covered rocks brighter than Dean's eyes. Couples got married at the top of the falls. "Hold my hand, huckleberry." Together they stuck their tongues out at the bison, who rolled their eyes and stuck out their tongues back.

At night they watched the full moon, ate huckleberry ice cream until their mouths turned purple, kissed berry-stained lips together in the starlight over and over again, held onto each others' faces as if they would disappear, huddled for warmth in their tent, the sleeping bag, sticky fingers joined knuckle-to-knuckle, cold toes at the backs of thighs, breath on the back of necks, Dean speaking under his breath - orders, pleas, sighs, pet names - into Sammy's ears, diving to press frosty noses into warm bellies, holding onto the warmest parts of themselves for luck.

John came back from the bars at dawn. They didn't care.

*

Disney World 2010

Dean hadn't come back to the land of fairy tales for twenty years.

"Be anything you want to be, Sammy," he'd said then, when he caught his brother looking at the painted-plywood princesses in their gowns, the wedding of Cinderella in her castle. For his part, Dean had cut the lines and kept trying to jump over the restraints, swept his hands through the projections of the ghosts at the Haunted Mansion, tried to throw trash at the wooden cut-outs and tiny gnomes of fairy tale land until men in suits came to kick them out. Dean had eluded them too when he saw Sammy's lipgloss-painted mouth turned down, his white booties shuffling, the fall of his hair and his sad eyes behind his shiny, pink, heart-shaped glasses. Dean had smirked, "You can be a princess if you wanna."

Sammy spoke then clear and flat. "No one wants me like this."

Dean's heart still breaks for his brother, every day, just as it had then - old steel melted in the cracks, melted, hardened again. So many times he can't count. His mouth had been hard like Sammy's, his voice just as clear. "Then you can be my princess. I don't care."

Sammy had looked down anyway. "You're my brother. Doesn't count."

"Nah, man," Dean had said. "Counts more because of that."

It had worked too - the sunglasses, the lipgloss, the jean skirt all stayed the whole time they were in Florida. Nothing was set there; everyone came from somewhere else; those who called it home were all pretenders; laziness was a pastime; anything worth running from, could be run from - the asphalt melted soft beneath bare feet, the swamp hid all lies. They could stay as they were, before John beat it out of them.

Even now, in Texas, which he hated even more than California, Sammy was still a beautiful girl - Dean thought so, drinking in the sight of long brown hair, lilac skin in a white dress, waiting for him in the Impala outside the prison gates of the Sanchez Unit. It might as well have been fairy tale land for all he thought of the world. White princess dress, imagined innocence, new freedom. This was it, this was their chance. He shut the door without a word and Sammy drove the I-10 east.

"You know, I learned to read in there." Dean confessed it when they drove through the tip of Alabama.

"Yeah?" Sammy's sunglasses were dark this time, no less pretty.

"Yeah," Dean's voice was rough. He cleared his throat between every few words. "Some kind of angel taught me."

"That's real good." When Sammy said it, Dean knew it was true. If both their hearts were anywhere close to bursting like his own. Anywhere close. Cleared throat speaking, "What did you read?"

Dean said what, watched the giant fragile birds tiptoe through the sawgrass along the road.

*

Sammy pulled up to the beach cabin - one bedroom, tiny kitchen, round table - at dark. His eyes looked wearier than Dean had ever seen them. Were they? Really? Dean didn't know. "Hey," he touched pink lips, lilac skin with worn fingertips, "Be happy. For me?"

Sammy nodded, ate his anger at everything but Dean, wanted to do it right, get Dean and himself both out, start over. He volunteered at the community center in Daytona; he bought Dean a cafe at the beach where he could fry fish and hush puppies, wear a white apron to catch the stains, take a smoke break and stare at the waves. Dean took a drag, "What'd you do, man? Rob a bank?"

"Nope," Sammy answered. "I crashed a yacht. Split the insurance money. Got off okay."

Dean huffed out a laugh, "You lawyers are so shady."

The sun set in the evenings, as it always had. This time, Dean read aloud from Mark Twain talking about his own Huckleberry, from Harper Lee talking about the law. When the lamp next to the bed was off, he took his beautiful princess into his arms, thought of hot steam, wildflowers, sweat-soaked southern beds and giant fragile birds. His brother the only one he'd ever wanted to fuck - he knew that now, in the way the knowledge broke him apart, in the way Sammy broke apart for him too - ass high in the air over long legs, hands clenched in the sheets, clenched face, clenched hole milking at his cock every time, dick long and hard and coming forever, coming new perfect Sammy.

He let his brother take him too, take him back, in ways he hadn't been taken in years, those years he was taken a thousand, million different ways, and never taken at all, not like this. Sammy slid their bodies so easily together, slipped in and out all night, his big dick hard unless found at home in the end in Dean, inside that body he'd fought so long to save, not knowing it was for himself, yet knowing all the same. Each night, Dean found a new way to come for him, surprising even himself, even this body, when he thought there would never be any more.

Each night, they take on the parts of each other. Sammy takes Dean's hand after work, walks him home along the shore, and is there when he wakes up in the morning.

 

The End


End file.
